Sunday, June 26, 2011

Downtown South Bend Criterium

The day after Glencoe I decided to head out to South Bend for some crit racing.  The field wasn't huge but was respectable sized.  Lots of Cat 3s, which is tough because most all of them had already raced the 3/4 race earlier.  My collegiate teammate Doug "Duggles" Ansel almost took that one, but got second out of the break.  Congrats to him on a good effort.

Our race started with a few break attempts.  I was in a frustrating position: I knew I was strong enough that I should have made the break, but only strong enough to go with half the serious moves.  So I missed the five man winning break, which was a bummer.

Back in the main field, guys were hurting big time.  They were letting stuff go off the front like it was nothing.  At one point three guys went, and then a fourth, fifth and sixth guy bridged like it was nothing and nobody reacted.  The "break" grew to ten guys.  It really ticked me off, so I decided to play sweeper and clean up the mess.  My other collegiate teammate, Matt, was about to bridge as well.  I turned to him and said, "no man, just sit on.  I'm sick of this crap."  I hit the front and pulled back all fifteen seconds from the ten man break.

The winning five man break lapped us.  I hopped on as they came by, and the field realized they could too.  Three guys from the break attacked.  Brandon Feeherty, who was in the break, asked if I wanted to try to bridge to the three guys and if I'd help him.  I told him yes, so we went.  A third guy grabbed our wheels.  I pulled at a pretty unsustainable pace for the first three laps to get Brandon up there but couldn't help him get there.  We had like 12 laps to go, and it was pretty obvious we'd make it the whole way since the field was toasted.  Brandon pulled the last lap and really helped me stay with the break toward the end, which was nice of him, but I still couldn't win the sprint.  I thought we were sprinting for 6th buy apparently some other group got off the front that I didn't know about so I only got 13th.

Glencoe NRC

It didn't go well.

Thanks for reading

Brian Boyle