I've been trrying to get worked up about the Giro - but really without Basso and any of the good riders, yawn!  I know, Basso is a cheater - well who isn't - in baseball and NASCAR they say "if you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'", but in cycling everyone wants this lillie white "clean" sport.  Come on already, the NFL is the dirtiest sport of all when it comes to dope - and they are by far the most popular sport- so who really cares about being clean?  Not the spectators, not the sponsors, not the teams or team managers - so enough of this witch hunting - let 'em ride and that which does not kill you only makes you faster!  Better living thru science - if they want to be test monkeys so be it. I just want to watch a good race...

Not enough ranting for you?  Try this from Patrick O'Grady - the original ranter (if you ignore Ed Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson that is):

http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/12221.0.html

The BV Adventure race was all it was said to be - http://www.gravityplay.com/adventureracing/.  Fun and tricky class 3 whitewater - in a duckie (we went swimming, but so did almost everyone else - I don't think I relaxed the sphincter once the whole way down!).  Hard, hot and long uphill mountain biking (who knew BV had a desert? It was sandy, and it was hot, and it was technical - it was Moab at 9000 feet)!  How cool is that?  Everyone was running out of food and water;  everyone was dry heaving and bonking - sounds like fun for all you crazy bastards eh?  :)  And nine hours later we got to haul our mostly dead ( "I've been mostly dead all day") dehydrated (I ran out of water and food at six hours) and disoriented (we missed 7 checkpoints on the O course for a 1 hour 10 minute penalty) across a 400 foot Tyrolean traverse - like doing 1000 situps and pushups at the same time!  Try that with your little emaciated biker bodies! 

In the end we finished in fifth in the pro class, not bad for a team with full-time jobs, families, and little natural talent - must've been the Drip and Enduro keeping us going.  I know that I finished still feeling good and all I had to eat and drink all day was 20 ounces of drip - my camelback managed to leak the other 50 ounces all over me) and 3 Sweet and salty nut bars, plus a couple bottles of water.  I was just having too much fun, in the sick twisted way of an adventure racer, to realize how wasted I was - the last part of the mountain biking section was on an old railroad bed and we were flying - yahoo!  Haven't tried adventure racing yet - come on out - the next one is here in Durango and there isn't anywhere else in the World I'd rather live and race...

And in case you're worried about it - everything I took during the race was legal - I'm too old to be the test monkey!