Never ask an amateur how many minutes are left in the race. It makes us think you're weak.

So to the random Bissell guy at Nevada City, we still had about 50 minutes left. Hope that helps.

Every summer, this will be number 14, I head up to Pederson Point Alaska to take part in the Bristol Bay Salmon Season. My family owns a boat up there and my dad, brother and I work it every year. This is commercial fishing folks; all work and no play. I've been trying to get out of it for years but my mother knows how to lay down a pretty mean guilt trip.

So what kind of hardship will this trip dish out? Well, 3 weeks of no research, 3 weeks without my wife and 3 weeks without my bike. The research, well no one wants to work anyway, my wife will actually enjoy it, but the bike, oh the bike.

Through high school and undergrad, I was a runner. Alaska was great because it gave me a mandatory 4-6 weeks off. This kept me relatively injury free, but I was always a little behind for cross country season in the fall. Now that I'm a cyclist, it comes at the worst possible time, the middle of the season.

What am I doing to deal with it? First, I'm only going for 3 weeks this year, down from 6 last year. Second, I trained hard up to now so I'm due for some time off anyway. And lastly, I have some solid goals for when I get back to keep me motivated. All of these are improvements over last year.

So what does this all mean? Well, I'll come back ready to start riding and racing hard through the end of the season. Elite Nationals is going to hurt, but I should be rolling nicely by Utah. Come September and Collegiate Track Nationals, I'll be back to crushing the dreams of America's youth.

So why do I go? The family business obligation is a major part of it and I do come back with a nice paycheck. But I'm really hoping this will be my last year.

I put together some pictures from 2004 and 2005. The place is like a time capsule, nothing ever changes, so I stopped taking pictures. Should give you a bit of an idea of what I do.

While I'm up there I'll be completely out of email and cell phone range. But don't forget about paulmach.com, there will be some awesome preposted content coming your way soon.

Like a Prrrrrroooooo, with your road bike, next to mine. Okay, so it wasn't my first NRC race, but I don't consider hanging on for dear life at Sea Otter racing.

Saturday's Tour de Nez circuit race wound around the Northstar Village. I don't know exactly how to describe the course. It was about 1.75 miles 22 times. It had a decent climb, wound through the actual village on the bricks and had a bunch of fun turns.

The pace started off pretty high. I was just feeling out the course for most of the first half. Then Graham Howard from Bissell came rolling by me and I got on his wheel. I thought he was just moving up, but he hit the front and kept going.

We worked together for a lap and then a couple more guys joined us. We had about 12 laps to go at this point. I was working, but learning from the day before, I made sure to keep it within my limit. With about 7 laps left, like 4 Bissell guys rolled up to us and took over the work.

With a lap to go Jonathan Baker attacked and I chased it down. I was pretty tired after that. Roman rolled by me and looked calm, collected and focused. Then he goes and wins the thing. I ended up 6th. Our group was 30 seconds ahead of the next guy. That was enough to move me up to 8th in the GC.

There was definitely another level of team tactics going on in this race. All the pros had their heads up and knew exactly what was going on. Even the ones without radios. I was always a little behind, but played my cards a lot better than Friday.

Props to my wife for fulfilling one of her goals for the weekend. Some random guy walked up to her and asked, "Who's that ZteaM guy in the break?" Sara answered, exactly like she'd practiced, "That's my husband, Paul Mach." This should keep me "in" for another couple of months or so.

Ever wonder what a cyclist's body really looks like? Go ahead drink it in. Even if you can only make out part of the right arm, it's still impressive.

Big thanks to the ZteaM for their support. Christian was all over it with cooking and bike cleaning.

Another big thanks to the Tour De Nez. It seemed like the whole race was just flying by the seat of its pants, but in the end it was awesome.

I first saw this one on Scott Nydam's blog. It's part of the Tour De Nez Collection by Lyne Lamourenx. It's after the road race on Friday and Christian just doesn't know what to think of Matt Cooke.

So if you have a caption, post it as a comment!