Good race weekend....

This week was great. My leg is feeling better and better and I had my 1st real good week of training since I have been hurt. With big races on the horizon I opted to train straight through this weekends racing. So I was a little tired but the leg held up great.

Saturday, Josh, Joe, and I rocked up to Cleveland to do the 1st RATL race of the year. We hooked up with Chad "the boss and don't you forget it" Thompson and Jeff Braumberger to make us 5 strong. We rode a good hour out to the race and had a good go. We had a good team plan and I was lucky enough to be able to just be aggressive and do my thing. Our plan worked pretty good except we only put 1 rider in the break... Josh was teamed up on pretty good but showed his talent in keeping the 5 man break together and then beating all of them in the sprint. Jeff gave me a great lead out for the field sprint but I got a little antsy and jumped to early into the headwind and didn't have enough gas to hold it to the line. So I ended up 8th on the day and was pretty happy with that. A nice ride back to Chad's made a great day of training.

Sunday we rocked up just the 3 of us and the weather was pretty rough. 50s and raining... not my favorite race weather. A pretty small field with our biggest threat being Kirk Albers from Roadhouse so our plan was to try to attack the field as much as possible. This we did as Joe, Josh, and I took turns attacking. Joe had the ride of the day as he soloed for about 25 miles and was finally caught by Kirk and a little chase group that included Josh with about 15 miles to go. Joe went again with about 5 miles to go and got caught with about 500 meters to go but set up Josh perfectly to take home his 2nd win in as many days. Joe hung tough for 4th and I rode in with a small group for 8th.

All in all it was a good weekend for the team and was great to be back in full swing. Next week we start Speedweek with Athens Twilight on Saturday. and then 6 straight days of big money crits down south. Really looking forward to hooking up with the team and getting some top notch racing in. I am sure I will have a ton of updates, hilarious stories and hopefully some great pics as well as some great results.

Look out for these gansters.... they will be running around all over the south reaking havic in a city near you!!

till next time... m@