Finished my first stage race this weekend and ended up doing okay. The road race was hard at first and I managed to get 17th. I wasted my TT effort during the road race as I ended up popping off of the front group on the last hill when a couple people attacked, then got stuck in no-man’s-land. I tried to get on J. Mayfield’s wheel but ended up blowing after pulling right before the feedzone hill. Big mistake! I should have told him I’d help on once it flattened out a bit!

So I hammered in TT mode for 6 miles to the finish, always looking back to make sure I wasn’t caught and ended up finishing about a minute and a half behind the front group, and a minute and a half in front of the rest of the pack. Smack dab in the middle!

Ironic that the TT was about 6-miles as well, as I even had the thought as I was a chasing that I was wasting my TT effort during the road race!? I thought with some food and a few hours of rest, I could recover enough, but my TT wasn’t all that impressive. I made it hard and paced it well, I just wasn’t fast enough. I think I got around 20th place in the TT.

Then in the criterium, the course was even more technical than prior years with a couple new turns. One of them was a 120° rounder, on a section of rough pavement. There were four crashes there in the field before and so I think our field was extra careful as we didn’t have one mishap during our 75-minute race. The first twenty minutes was really hard for me and I thought about quitting a few times. But I stuck it out and by forty minutes I was able to hang on without as much suffering. I did notice a few of my GC neighbors weren’t there anymore and was then motivated to hang on to the end. By the finish I was surprised at how few people actually finished! Good news for me is that my perseverance paid off and I moved all the way up to 10th overall. Not bad.