TRIA Orthopaedic Center Your Cycling Blog

Carson Miller is a professional for the Land Rover-Orbea team, which benefits the Lance Armstrong Foundation. He’ll be blogging daily during this week’s Nature Valley Grand Prix, so keep tuned to the TRIA Orthopaedic Center blog for some more PRO insight during the race. Enjoy!

With the team having completed a successful first year induction to the TD Bank Philadelphia International Championship, we were all on the road again. I was flying from our team base in Portland, Oregon to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the rest of the team was flying from Philadelphia to St. Paul, MN where we would all meet up to prepare for the Nature Valley Grand Prix.

After spending nine hours in planes, airports, lines, and public transportation systems, I finally connected with the team which had come into St. Paul on a different flight. With the Rovers loaded up, it was off to find our host families for the week. Despite having a GPS enabled LR3, as well as 2 iPhone’s, and 2 BlackBerry’s, I have learned that we almost routinely make several u-turns. And it is definitely easier to pull u-turns when you are not driving an SUV that is towing a 16-foot trailer. Turns out that our “3 u-turn policy,” was almost fulfilled. After some stumbling around, and 2 u-turns, we finally found our way here.

We got things rolling today with a hospital visit in St. Paul. The team was founded and came about as a way to “pay forward” the generosity of the Lance Armstrong Foundation as well as the cancer community that was so terrific in supporting David and Norrene, our team managers, while Norrene’s mom fought her battle with cancer. Part of that mission, is to visit approximately 1 children’s hospital per NRC event that we race in. During these visits, we get to share the joys of cycling with the children while handing out LiveSTRONG wrist bands and telling how they too can LiveSTRONG.

After returning from the hospital, we made ourselves some lunch and prepared the bikes for an afternoon training session. The team rolled out for a couple hours to get the legs moving again. Our evening was simple and low-key; shower, eat dinner, team meeting, and then some time in front of the TV before bed.

With all of the final preparations made for the coming 5 days of racing here at the Nature Valley Grand Prix, my eyes are getting a bit heavy, and tomorrow will get off to an early 9:45 start as we all take a crack at the challenging 7km TT.

Thanks for reading. As a side note, I am going to be keeping daily updates coming here. As part of this week’s racing, I have agreed to keep some daily updates, and you can all find them right here. Until tomorrow…

Keep the Rubber Side Down,

C-

Carson Miller,LAF,Land Rover,LiveStrong,MBF,Minnesota Bike Festival,Nature Valley Grand Prix,NVGP,ORBEA     Comments Off