Tonight were the “warm-up” events for tomorrow’s championships. Heather’s race was first and it looked like a pretty big field with a lot of heavy hitters. Heather got a bad start but her teammate was up near the front for the first few laps I watched before I had to go start warming up for my race. It turned out that Heather started to feel more comfortable by the end of the race and made a move to the front with three laps to go, but then got swarmed. So she ended up towards the back of the pack for the finish.

I got a decent warmup in and got to the staging area just in time for the women’s race finish. When all the women went by we spilled onto the course and I went straight to the official in the starting area, holding his arms out. I’m like, “cool, I got the perfect starting position on the first row!” But all the other racers ignored the official and went straight to the line. By the time I also started to move forward, i was now mid-pack…and it was a big pack. Our field was full at 150 riders!

So the race starts and after the first two stretches, I could tell I didn’t have the speed I would need. I managed to stay mid-pack for a while, but it was hard with all the accordion effect going on in the corners. It was fast from the start and when I looked down at my clock thinking that we were only riding for like 8 minutes! I couldn’t believe it, I thought it must have been 20 by then. So I stuck it out and was basically mid to back of the pack. I decided that I’d just use today as a warm-up for tomorrow’s race.

Then 18 minutes into it there were some really dark clouds approaching and I decided to just bag it at that point. When I stopped my clock I recorded that we averaged 28 mph for those 18 minutes. On a somewhat hilly course like this, that’s fast. After my “race” we headed back to the hotel, showered then went out to dinner with Heather’s teammates. None of us did as well as we wanted to so we were hoping tomorrow would be a better day.