San Marcos Crit

Did my second race recently, and my first "non-ride around a flat rectangle and wait for the sprint". Will do another one of those babies next weekend ;)

San Marcos Crit features a pretty cool course- a 60' little pitch on one section, then a much shallower, but still uphill, drag to the line, followed by a few bombing straightaways into a headwind. Most races tend to blow up a bit on the course, so my goal was just to finish and get some confidence rolling towards more training and cx season. It was HARD. It started off easily enough, but once a group of 8 or so wanted to try and get up the road, it strung out pretty much the whole ~60 person peleton. There ended up being some gaps, and about 3-4 groups strung out... of which I was in the 3rd. Thankfully right as I was nearing my limit the front group was caught and everyone took a breather. At this point I really wish I was in shape, because my style would be to attack right then... but I was only thinking of recovery. For the rest of the race I just hung on for dear life on the uphill portion of the climb and flew down as hard as I could on the downhill making up 10 or so spots each time that I could then give up on the hill without losing ground. Ended up working allright... was able to hang until the last time up the hill where I just let the race go and rode my way over the line.

Next week is another CBR- flat crit. I felt real good at the last one, but just got boxed and didn't have the balls to do much about it. This time I'll try and make some more effort to stay up there.