This is the cover. It will be cropped a little but you get the idea

It’s been awhile since I blogged. I’ve had stuff to write about from the Tour of California, like Tim Johnson telling me how the Health Net squad and the Slipstream team got into a food fight. Johnson is great at giving me the hot scoop on what’s really going on. But like Tim blogged on ROAD Mag, we were slammed. We got everything in this morning so we are officially done. The one thing that threw a spanner into the works was choosing the cover shot. We had a bunch of great shots, but once we blew them up to cover size, they started to pixulate. Or the photo was ever so slightly out of focus, giving the photo a ‘soft look.’ It was two days of Tim going over photos, printing them out and then us looking at them trying to make a choice. At one point we almost had the cover. It was crystal clear, but not very exciting. Just the front of the group rolling along. Not something that really grabbed us. I had shown Tim a photo I took from the prologue. It’s of Levi throwing the bike across the line. It turned out very sharp. We were going to use it in our ToC feature, but I jokingly said why don’t we try that as a cover? I’ve never had a cover, so my life has been an empty shell. Using one of my shots would complete my life. Tim did a mock up of my photo on the cover and we liked it! So it is official, I have a cover shot!

Now that we have a little bit of breathing room, I’m going to start blogging more and write about such subjects like who scrawled ‘ROAD Mag’ on our training loop in Santa Clarita, how the Rock Racing team is like the Steelers, and why Floyd Landis called an editor at Bicycling Magazine a butt pirate.

Tim and I saw this on yesterday’s ride on Old Road in Santa Clarita.

Me interviewing Bettini at the ToC. He’s thinking about my Britney Spears question.
“Si, we did bump into Britney. She’s pazzesco!”

The Rock Racing guys rolled up to Merced in Cadillac Escalades with big chrome wheels and thumpn’ sound system. Word!