Friday was a twilight crit in a nice little area of Cincinnati call Madeira. Good crowds, good course (unless you're scurred of the dark and 180* turns), and it's conveniently located next to our sponsor's, family's home. Which is more like a hotel. I had good legs coming off Nature Valley, so that racing was fun for me. The 3 of us Panthers were aggressive and we had Paul in a solo move for the middle 30 minutes of the race, which let Kirk and I relax for a bit. Jamey Driscoll of Jamis slowly, bus surely pulled it back together and the remaining 20 laps or so were very aggressive as we tried to get a break to go. No break went, but we did whittle the front group to 25 guys or so. I got bumped off Kirk's wheel by Clayton Barrows in the final 180 and tried to fight him for it, but he is a large man. I had to settle for 6th with Jamis stacking the top, but Clay Murfet got the win.
Got you tix to the gun show?
Saturday we hung out by the pool, went for a little spin and I took a 2 hour nap, all before heading down to the course for the Hyde Park Blast at 8:30. For some reason the course is always pretty brutal. Lots of attrition again and it wasn't even that hot. Clayton Barrows was away solo for a looong time, Paul (our Paul) and Jamey Driscoll, Clay Murfet, and 2 others bridged up and lapped the field. Once It was all back together Greg, Kirk and I took the front with 4 to go to hopefully shepherd Paul to the W. Greg did what he does best and smashed out a few strong laps, all the way down to 1/2 lap to go when a Jamis guy jumped and then I followed with Kirk and Paul on my wheel. We came out of the last corner sitting pretty well and Kirk opened up the sprint from a long way out for Paul. It was probably 350 meters to the line and Paul drag raced his breakaway companions to a 2nd place on the day and a nice chunk of the 10,000 bucks. Kirk and I rolled in in 9th and 11th to collect a bit of change for the team as well.
Greg, Me, Kirk, Paul in hiding.
I headed up to my regular host house for Ohio racing, the Chartier's, after the race and we ate some delicious Wendy's Dollar Menu items and tried to get rid of our late night racing buzz so we could sleep. That happened around 2AM... We had breakfast over a live feed of the Belgian Champs and I was on my way to Columbus for the Tour de Grandview, one of my favorites. 40 trips up the hill always seems to soften the legs and it's an uphill sprint that I tell myself is good for me.
The race was aggressive early, but nothing was really going anywhere until I unleashed the mother of all attacks. Not actually, but I did attack on the hill and dragged 3 others with me. We had a nice gap immediately and had some critical teams represented, so we worked our gap up to a minute inside the last 3 laps and then started thinking about how to sort things out from there. One of the guys in the move was none other than recently upgraded cat 2 Jon Atwell from Bloomington. He's much stronger than his category would suggest. I knew this and tried to make sure he didn't try any funny business and ride away from all of us Fabian style. Since he is a bit of a newb, he got stuck on the front leading it into the uphill sprint. From here I can let the photos do the talking:
So Jon lead the sprint out and still got me. Piss. None of us had any clue at the time who'd won. But if I had to lose that though, I'm glad it was to another Bloomington racer. Some consolation was that my 2nd place moved me up to second in the Omnium for the weekend and netted me and my baby momma's some mo' money. Hollerrr!
