Saturday was the Ballard crit, and to my great joy the sun was shining and the weather was beautiful. After a morning of mudding up holes and cracks before I paint my soon to be new bedroom I rolled down to Ballard in time to catch the finish of the women's race. My teammate Trish won it which is pretty frickin awesome given that she just started racing this season, and already has her first win since upgrading just a few weeks back.

As for my race, I didn't do quite so well. I don't think that I raced a bad race, but I'm not at all confident that I raced a good race. Early on, maybe fifteen minutes in I put in a little attack off the front, but I was solo so there was no real hope of staying away. Fortunately, one lap into my little attack the prime bell rang and I was able to stay off the front to take that fairly easily. Unfortunately that was probably my highlight for the evening. I put in a few other attacks that didn't really go anywhere, chased back a break or two, and all around raced a little below my potential. In the last third of the race the flat backstretch was prone to a lot of surges making it substantially more difficult to just get up front and stay up front. Especially if (like me) you are a sissy in turn three and don't like bombing along the inside and then chopping people in the corner. With five minutes to go I had myself in pretty terrible position. I managed to get myself up into 10th or 15th position on the last lap just before turn one, but between turns one and two the pack caught Johnny Sundt who had been off the front and was going backwards fast. I ended up right behind him and hemmed in on both sides. I lost position and momentum and didn't have the time to make it up. Ooops.

Ended up 15th with energy to spare. Overall a decent effort, fun and all that, but I need to work on my positioning and willingness to take more risks through the corners.