March/April

After the epic Cateye road race a week of good training brought the Koppenberg Circuit. This race has always been fairly straight forward, follow the strong guys as long as you can. I did just that and not much more, ending up at the back of the lead group. Not-so-Mini-Phinney made one heck of an impression on me there, that kid appears to have ALL the goods to make it big in bike racing if he wants to. It will be entertaining to watch his career unfold.

After a weather weekend off of racing Beth and I headed to Texas for some family functions, including my nephew's birthday. I managed to race EARLY the next morning but was feeling the 3+ hrs I had spent in the jumpy castle the day before. It was an experience I haven't had in a while, I was there solo and there were several large teams present. Just like CO those teams just kept attacking until an acceptable group got off. I missed that group so decided to sit, chill and see what I could do at the end. The break had 2:30 at the start of the last climbing stretch. I tried to bridge across and got within 30 seconds before hitting a long headwind stretch that ended my attempt. A few guys came up to me and we road together until the finish. The racing scene seemed very similar to Colorado, although it was nice not to have a sizable portion of the pro peleton on hand to dose out pain.

Next up was quick weekend trip to Nebraska to avoid the dreaded AST crit.