Deutschland!

We just finished the first night of racing here in Dortmund and things are good. The organizers sprung for rooms at the Hilton so as I write I'm wearing an embossed Hilton bathrobe with handsome matching slippers and Brian is fixing up my hair with our new Hilton combs. Not really, we combed our hair earlier, I can't concentrate on writing while he's grooming me. But it's well known in Euro circles that nothing creates a stronger bond between madison partners than sharing moments such as these, so we're really making the effort. See what you learn here? This is proprietary sechstage info you're privy to.

Our last few days in the Netherlands were good. Most of our time revolved around training sessions with the Australian and Dutch national teams, who were gracious enough to invite us to their private sessions. Most of those sessions were occupied with us sucking wheels behind the Aussies and the Dutch team pursuit squad, mixed in with fighting over the wheel of a Dutch woman who looks like a blond Bjork. Before the sessions we were occupied with making sandwiches out of the breakfast buffet to last us through the day, then post-training we kept busy by trying to stay awake until 9pm, finding dinner for less than 10 euros, and avoiding the creepy and somewhat hostile group of hippies at our hostel.

This morning we made the three hour drive to Dortmund, and though I had a surprisingly good time in the Netherlands, it still feels nice to be back in Germany. Even though I really don't any ties here and schpreche keine deutsch, it still feels nicely familiar. Hopefully in a few months I'll be deutsching it up and then I'll really be one of the cool kids. Speaking of cool kids, check out the pictures above for a little glimpse into the glamorous life of u25 six-day stars such as ourselves.

And speaking of stars, let's talk racing. We're doing 40km/200 lap madisons every night, and tonight it took us about 100 laps to find our legs. The field is comprised of 14 teams, which is just about right for a 200. I never felt like it was totally roller derby like last year, and there were only one or two teams who were pushing about and yelling. I'm pretty happy with how tonight went, even though we didn't place too well. My reason is that it seems to take at least one 6 to get used to your partner, and that is compounded by Brian being new to the 6-day mayhem. But with that against us, we still didn't miss any exchanges, scored points more than once, and did a decent job of holding position. Ultimately that was still our greatest weakness--getting gapped off in the sprints then missing the moves. We ended three laps down on the leaders, but didn't lose any laps, we simply never took a lap. Laps don't carry over from day to day though, so it's no problem to go down one night since everything is run on an omnium format. Every day we race together I reckon we'll improve though, and we certainly have the potential to factor into the races and place in some once we find our feet and maybe a bit of good luck.

Tomorrow we'll sample the wide assortment of balms, lotions, and other elixers made available to us by Hilton, then rouse ourselves for night two. Stay tuned for all the gritty inside stories from Real World UIV-Cup: Dortmund.