Last night was the Prologue of the Tour of Eagle. The race organizer created this crazy, technical course utilizing some walking pathways by the Riverwoods executive park (where the Hilton Garden Inn and Bardenay’s is located). The first half was technical, then it spilled out onto the major road that we rode down for 1/2 kilometer, then turned around and went all out for another kilometer to the finish. It was so short that times weren’t that separated, but all the 90° turns on the walking paths made it quite interesting!

Tonight was the highlight of this race, the Eagle downtown crit. Not as crazy as the Wells Fargo Twilight crit, it still brought a lot of the Eagle residents out to watch some fast cycling. Heather raced first and won it. Again, it was fun to watch teams not know how to race as a team so Heather could just take advantage of that. A lot of our neighbors and friends came out to the race so I gave them a mini-bike race tutorial on criterium racing strategy.

My race came later and as always, we were pressed for daylight. Things got slightly delayed somewhere along the lines and we would be butting up against nightfall. Unlike the Boise Twilight, they don’t bring in night construction lighting for this course. I was basically pack-fodder for this race and hung out at the back most of the time. I did move up a couple times to test out my legs but didn’t go for the finish. By the last 5 laps, it was pretty dark at turn two and getting dangerous.