Back on track!

The past couple months have been a bit rough. Slowly getting back into racing after Dylan was born but I haven't been very consistent with my training.  Seems like I would get going and then get sick.. or something would come up..  I was planning on using Memorial Day Weekend as a "get me over the hump" weekend of racing.  4 races in 4 days including a 100 mile road race.  The weekend was a great success from my standpoint even though the results weren't great.  7th in the road race and 16th at Rock Island and some bad luck in Muscatine with 1 to go.  But the legs were pretty good and I finished the weekend strong and not totally smashed.  So things were on the up and up heading into last weekends Huntington Crit.

Was looking forward to racing in Huntington as I used to road trip down there back in the day and spent some fun times down there. Training has been full fledge for Nationals at the end of the month so I was looking to smash it after a nice 2 hour training ride in the morning.

The course was tailer made for me.. flat 4 corner downtown crit with a bar on one side of the start finish and a Starbucks on the other.

The team wanted to be aggressive from the get go and I figured I would start the action 2 laps in and went on the offensive with Rolf (TRH). We worked well together and got a pretty nice gap. We could see a group coming across 7-8 laps later but couldn't make out who all was in there just yet. Once they got close enough we realized it was 3 RGF and 2 more TRH. The showdown was on and we had the upper hand with 4 to their 3. We all worked smoothly to gain 3/4 of a lap on the field and then the attacks started. Jim Baldasare followed Rolf again and they were the 1st to take a lap. We were pretty happy with this but we kept rolling to make sure we stayed out front. With 10 laps to go I sent the boys on the attack again to see if we could single out the Roadhouse guys. I sat tight and made sure John Grant (TRH) was held in check as he was their fastest finisher. A couple laps later we also took a lap and I sent Jeff on the attack straight away. This forced Roadhouse to chase and as he was caught I sent JC. He put in a HUGE dig as Grant tried to follow with me in tow. This split us away from the field again with Jon Shell making a nice move to get across to us. We had now singled out a TRH rider which was perfect. We held the gap and coming into the final lap I jumped down the back stretch and held on for my first win of the season. Great to be back! And the team rode great which is a great sign with Nationals on the horizon. They made my job easy today... thanks boys!

  Great Video of the Race:

Tri-State Criterium Huntington, WV from Bob Grimm on Vimeo.

Nice Article in the Huntington Herald:

Riders compete in Tri-State Criterium - The Herald Dispatch