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The weather that rained out the stage 1 crit, turned around for a good day of racing. It was probably 55F at the start warming up to around 65-70F at the end… The field was a big field (80 riders) for what was a narrow and at times bumpy course.

Right out of the gate, the speed ramped up pretty fast as we bombed down some bumpy roads at 40 mph.. The race was not too bad to stay with, but hard to stay up in the field. At least 5 times, I moved up in the field to the middle to maybe 25-30 back from the front, but would soon find myself near the back at group would surge up the other side or sometimes over the yellow line. The officials were pretty good about relegating yellow line infractions, but whenever the motos would be both up front, it would happen… oh well, it wasn’t that bad… We did 3 laps of 26 miles. I pretty much rode the first lap or two by trying to move up and finding myself near the back and repeating….

By the 3rd and final lap, I started to try to move up in the field (up the side of the road, which involved riding in a lot of gravel and bad pavement….). I was probably got up to about the top 30 and was still advancing as we ramped up speed for the final kilometer. The finish was slightly uphill and I was making pretty good progress… In the end, I had to dodge two riders sitting up and other people not getting up the hill as quick. In the end, I was 31st (63 finished with the field)… Not an awesome result, but hard fought. I was definitely happy with my ride today given the caliber of the field (mostly Cat 1 & 2s).

This afternoon is the 4 mile time trial. I hope to get a result in the top 50%, but that might be a tall order.

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Update: I think I just broke 9:00 for the 3.8 mile TT (just over 25 mph). The course is basically flat, but has two slight rises near the start… My tired legs had me slowing down to about 20 mph at the top of the first one and running in the low-20’s for a bit after the second. My time last year was 9:55, although I we might have had wind to deal with (don’t remember). For me, it was basically calm when I rode the course. Earlier riders were reporting a slight tailwind, but it probably didn’t amount to much anyway. The biggest difference is of course that I have a dedicated TT bike… I am starting to get used to doing efforts on it, I plan to practice / ride my bike some in the coming weeks to get more used to it. It is a big change from my clip-on road bike position.

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Update (Sunday morning). The results for the GC were posted up online last night. My RR finish was revised to 33rd place with 2 off the front and 64 in the field. In the TT, I posted a 8:55 which was good enough for 57th of the 78 that raced the TT. Not as high up as I hoped, but I pretty good within the Cat3’s. This race has a 8 deep cat 3 bonus ($500). At this point, I am 50th overall (+3:46) with 6 cat3’s ahead of me (and 3 more within 5 seconds behind me).

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Sunday morning…. found that one of the times I had to brake hard, I skinned my tubular pretty bad….