This scares the pants off me...or spandex chamois, as the case may be.

I'll be racing the Matrix Challenge in Dallas this weekend with teammate Chris Scully and a few guys from Team Type 1 elite.

As if the picture here were not cause enough for concern (can you say "ominous?"), it's made a bit more stressful thanks to a tight travel schedule. I fly in to Dallas on the 20th, and land late at night, around 10:55. I have to locate Scully and our rental van, and then head to the hotel for some rapid-fire bike assembly. (Heaven forbid we have a repeat of Phoenix, with the derailleur issues, because I doubt I will find a full service bike shop between midnight and our seven a.m. race time!)

After a short nap, Scully and I will be riding hard first thing in the morning! (Insert breathless panting here.) From there, we can grab a quick shower and some eats...and then head to an athlete appearance with my good friends from the Dallas Diabetes Health & Wellness Institute. (I had an earlier event with them a month ago alongside Bobby Heyer from the Tri Team and the Dallas Maverick's Street Team.) Eat, sleep, repeat.

Truly, I am super nervous about this race! I've been training hard the last few weeks...but crashed on a ride this weekend. I'm still nursing some road rash, a pretty tight right shoulder and two broken fingers. The course favors sprinters, with a couple of good corners but mostly long straightaways. Not awesome news for me. Really, this will be the kind of race where I hope to merely hang on, and not blow up on the backside of a sprint stretch.

Here's to hanging on!