Bunny Hop, 30+

This was a fun and educational race for me. First of all, it was fast. Fast and smooth. There was really only one corner of any significance in this race and my goal on each lap was to just keep my speed, stay in my line and be cool.  It was a 60 minute race. I thought coming in that I would see how it would go in the regular 30+ field and try to stay in for 30 minutes (mistake #1). Well, we got to 30 minutes and I started looking at the laps-to-go instead of just concentrating on efficient riding (mistake #2). So after one particularly hard lap, I just kinda sat up and stopped (super mistake #3).

Baker Park, 30+ Cat 4/5

This crit was 20 laps of a long skinny rectangle with three 90 degree turns and one gentle curve coming into a slight uphill finish. The pace seemed to be faster and more race-like than Carl Dolan and I could see good attempts to break away and good team efforts to catch various riders.  PoWER put four or five in the race and seemed to dominate from the gun. I started out perhaps a bit too cautiously and ended up towards the back of the 75 starters. There were a number of primes, so that kept the pace pretty high throughout. The best place to move up was on the uphill straight, so after about five laps I made a good effort to get up to about half way back. At about six laps to go I went hard on the inside of the uphill and popped right up to the front of the group--somewhere in the top three or four. I settled in and held a good position in the top ten for another three or so laps. Half way through three to go, I either picked a bad line coming into turn two, or someone attempted to "Gibbons" me and I had to break hard to avoid this, skidded a bit, and lost all my speed. I found myself instantly dangling off the back of the group at just the wrong time. I had to give it a strong effort to regain my speed and tried to move up again, but the pace at the front didn't abate and I was just a too gassed to pick up any spots. I rolled in at the back of the group for 32nd. Overall, not a bad outing.

-michael