St. Paul Washout Crit

Just a quick update after last night's ridiculously scary crit in downtown St. Paul. There were storms and rain all day yesterday and our race started after a short delay. It was sprinkling at the start and the course was extremely wet and full of puddles. It's a technical, 6 corner, 1K course with many manhole covers. The direction of the course was reversed to try to make it safer but we knew it wouldn't matter much. Many riders on the line were urging the officials to cancel the race as we all knew the conditions were going to make the race very dangerous. Despite our concerns the race started and was shortened to 30 laps. I had a decent start position and clipped in and held onto the barrier. Second corner riders at the front washed out and it was just a matter of avoiding downed riders and holding onto the field. Kristin Armstrong went off the front from the start and ending up lapping the field solo. Riders were going down practically every lap. The field was strung out for much of the race and although the pace settled now and again it was fast considering the conditions. Gaps would open off the back and halfway through the race only about 60 riders remained in the main group. I was happy to be tagged on the back of the field and wanted to just stick in as long as I could. With 5 laps to go my teammates Jackie and Debbie were both in the main group with me but unfortunately Debbie crashed for the third time, she hopped back in but was unable to stick with the group. I nearly went down after a rider crashed in front of me and for the last two laps I finished in a small group about 10 seconds behind the main field. The results misidentified me as my teammate Lori Jug but we'll try to get that fixed today. It was all moot in the end as they decided that this race would not count towards the general classification of the race. I can see both sides to this but it sort of makes you wonder why we were even out there racing at all. Sooooo many riders went down and I'm just hopeful no one was seriously injured.

All of our girls went down except for Kat, Andrea, and I - we were lucky. Mostly just some minor rash but there are lots of stiff sore riders this morning. Hopefully today goes better with the Cannon Falls road race that starts tonight. Weather looks good anyway!

Big thanks to my Uncle Kim, Aunt Terese, and cousin Maria for coming out to cheer me on! It was great to see you guys and hopefully we can catch up more after Stillwater on Sunday! Also huge thanks to our support crew for this race - Brooke and Mike have been dutifully cleaning and tuning bikes the past couple of days and we are so thankful for their help! Also Paul and Ed are making sure everything is ready for us - thanks guys!

Also thanks to Ryan and Rachael for all of the support out on the course. Ryan was out taking some cool pictures too - thanks for letting me use them here!

I somehow managed to forget my camera at home(!). I'll see if I can grab some from my teammates later. We've got a fun group put together for this race and I look forward to the rest of the week with them!
I'll try to update after the TT tomorrow!
Thanks for reading!