Not of the Brass

Stage 5 Brasstown, Georgia
April 22, 2006

I felt a bit better today, but the cough is ridiculous. It’s this phlegm sputter that must be cleared before I can actually breathe. This causes a series of problems stemming from a need to consume lots of oxygen in a hurry. Anyway, when I start climbing it’s not that bad, I guess when you breathe really hard the adrenaline kind of clears it out. Since Lucus was in the KOM jersey today he went ahead and got into another break, with Will this time, and attempted to conquer the mountains for another day. Unfortunately, J-Mac from discovery managed to get in the break as well. J-Mac got the 1st KOM and broke away in an attempt to grab the second one. The peloton caught Lucus and his break, but J-Mac remained up the road about to get the next KOM. If we could catch him before he got that last one, Lucus would continue to lead the competition into tomorrow. So we chased, but pretty much blew up coming into the climb and J-Mac stayed away until the KOM (just 30 seconds up the road). I had to chase back on over the climb.
We came down the hill and with 15 km to go Brasstown started! I thought it was only 5 km long?! So I ended up starting it from the very back of the pack and chasing the whole way. It was a fairly epic climb…