It has begun, the US Pro Cycling Challenge. All the big riders are here and there were a lot of fans on the course. There were actually people taking pictures on the prologue course when we preroad it on Sunday.

For all the talk about high altitude climbing, the prologue was a downhill drag. Well, it rolled along the Garden of the Gods and then dropped down into a left-hand turn. Then it was almost straight 5k to the line.

I was cracking with 3 or 4 kilometers to go. That was not good and I didn't have a very good time. Tomorrow is a totally different race.

Below is the Race Shape.com graph. You can see that the race could be lost before the decent and the left-hander, but was won by keeping the speed up for the last 5k.