Jason and I got registered and then joined in the spinning warm-up, we both were feeling pretty good and the sunshine helped. We were able to get one lap in before the start of the race. Since it is a motorcycle race course all the corners are wide and high speed, the course was incredibly smooth with only a few ripples in spots.
Everyone lined up; the field was maxed out at 75 people. I got lined up near the front right where I wanted to be. We rolled out at a fairly quick pace and everyone quickly filed into position. Since this was a training criterium there were a lot of new racers and they were scary. On the first lap there was already a pretty bad crash. Everyone was braking heavily around each corner and then bumping off each other constantly.
A group of four people jumped off the front very quickly and were distancing the peloton, I saw this happening and knew that some of the riders in the break were strong and could make it stick. I jumped hard and caught them pretty quickly but as I got up to them they all sat up and decided to drop back into the peloton. It seemed like nothing was going to stick this day, people were just to squirrly. There were two primes but no-one really seemed too interested in winning the pack of powerade. There were more many more crashes that happened through-out the race and some of them were quite bad. The closest I came to crashing was when someone dropped a water bottle and the guy from Cuttin Crew next to me hit it hard and exploded it all over the place and almost went down. As we were approaching the final turns to head into the finish I was sitting in a good position right behind Jason. We were about 20th or so and I was planning on doing a really strong lead-out with Jason on my tail and sling-shot him up. As we were heading into the second to the last turn the guy next to cut in really sharp and pushed me off the course onto the side. I ended up losing about 20 possessions because of it. I was pretty upset by this and tried to make it up in the final spring I ended up finishing 35th right with Ben VC and right behind Jason and Aaron.
Congratulations go to Henry for getting 3rd place!! Over all it turned out to be a strong showing from the Pega-crew. We weren't able to really work together to make anything happen but overall everyone made a really strong showing. Afterwards we hung out for awhile with the people from Pegasus, Half-Acre, and a few others to watch the other races. The hard part about racing is that it is hard to get pictures, here are a few pictures I grabbed from the Cat 3 race, it kind of sums up the days worth of crashing.
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