Tour of St Louis

I got to do an awesome stage race this weekend in St Louis. It had 2 super fast crits in parks no 4 corner boring stuff in sight.

Day 1

We had a crit a 1:45. Doing races in a area you don't know can be just as good as it can be bad. The people don't know you, but you also don't know them. For all you know you could be letting the best time trailer in the area up the road in a break. So you really have to be careful. I got in a super dangerous move with 10 other guys all the major teams were represented, including super sprinter Brad Huff of Jelly Belly. No one seemed content with the large break. So we ended up attacking each other for a while. I got away with a pretty good tt-er from big shark, and we opened up a 10 second gap. Brad tried to bridge but the gap was a little to big. He brang it back just enough so 2 more guys countered up to our break. So we now had 4 guys in the front with 6 in between the us and the peleton. They eventually got swallowed up, but our gap slowly opened. For over 50 minutes of the 75 minute race we stayed about the same gap with the pack. We ended up lapping the field at the 60 minute mark. Everything went pretty chaotic riders bouncing like pinballs off one another. With one to go I found myself swarmed and out of position. I tried to fly up on the outside with 2 turns to go, I pretty much ate curb and had to jam out on the brakes. I lost 20 spots right there in 2 seconds. I went way wide on the last turn and opened up my sprint 400 meters to early but I didn't have much of a choice. I closed in on the top 5 of the bunch as they spread across the road. I had the speed to come around, but no where to go. I was 3rd to come across from the riders that lapped the field. I won a 50 dollar prime some where in there to.


I was pretty nervous if I should ride hard for the 9 mile flat tt or not. Until Russ Let me borrow his super sweet specialized tt bike. I knew I had to just put it all on the line. The course was flat with a bit of cross wind and super smooth pavement. I rolled 50-52 kph on the way out with the wind. Into the wind on the way back I was able to stay at 46-47 kph. I wasn't sure if I had a good time or not till the next day when I woke up to find out. I slaughtered it, my time was a 18:26 with an average speed of 29.5 mph. It was good enough to win by 25 seconds.


So going into the last day I was leading the GC points by a bit I had 18 points and my closest competition had 13. So with the points going 10 for first 9 for 2nd and so on down to 10th place with 1 point. I knew I just had to stay close to the to my Gc competition and it'd be an easy win.
Sometimes the best defense is a great offense. After a broken spoke I went on the attack and a break of 4 was formed off the front with just 20 minutes and 5 laps remaining we opened up 10 seconds, With 10 minutes left we had 6 seconds then it went back to 15 then to 8. Then Team Mercy's Sprinter lepted across the gap. This left Big Shark out of the Break and as my only GC threat. Making the break work was my best option. I was doing minute pulls at over 450 watts. It wasn't until the last lap that we finally knew it would stick. Mercy setup a lead out and we all looked at each other coming around the final turn. No one wanted to go with 400 meters from the last turn to the finish. I made a gamble and jumped with 350 meters to go and got a gap. I couldn't spin my 12 over any faster with 100 meters to go. I went over the line with a 10 meter gap. Winning the race and the overall.

I want to give a big thanks to my teammates for getting me back to the front right away when I broke a spoke, and keeping all the danger breaks under control which wasn't an easy task.