On Saturday I raced at the Hagerstown crit in Hagerstown, which is a race that I liked last year. Nathan said though that they had returned to the old course from two years ago, which I had never raced on. He said it was flat with four corners and that it was harder than it sounds. I found that the course actually was pretty hard because it had a long finishing straight that was slightly uphill and two difficult corners: the first one and the second one. I did a few laps going fast when I warmed up on the course and thought that you could pedal through all of the corners except the second one but everyone went slower in the first corner during the race than I expected so the small hill after that corner was a hard acceleration that made me pretty tired by the end of the race.

The roads were completely dry and the pace felt slow to me but I got worn out by the end of the first ten or twelve laps because I got stuck behind three crashes during that time where I had to come to a full stop and then chase back on. That was a huge bummer because each time it was a hard effort to catch back up and then I had to spend a lot of energy trying to get back to the front and in good position. After all that stress and the hard chase my legs felt really bad and I was putting more effort into trying to get back to the front than just recovering and I thought that I might get dropped. The rest of the race was pretty hard for me and then on the second corner with two laps left there was a bad crash in front of me and I tried to chase back on but the pace was getting pretty fast with just one lap left I guess so I just got 40th or something like that.

Yesterday I raced in Richmond in Bryan Park. The race was pretty disorganized and the 915 juniors race started closer to 10. Unfortunately the juniors race was just five people too. My legs felt pretty bad because it was a short race and I didn't warm up. I would have warmed up but I never knew when the race was gonna start so I didn't want to leave sight of the start line. I tried to attack several times but my acceleration was like slow motion because my legs weren't great. I had one really well timed attacked where I got about a ten second gap for a whole lap by countering a series of hard attacks from the other riders but they eventually chased me down. Its hard to attack when there's only five people because its such a small group of people that every attack is immediately chased down as hard as possible.

Later in the day when the temperature was starting to rise I raced the 3/4 race with Justin and Shane. The first half of the race was easy and I wanted to attack but my legs were feeling pretty bad. I think the tough day I had at Hagerstown with all the crashes made me more tired than I expected. The second half of the race was easy also but it started to get pretty hot. I didn't put much energy into attacking because no attacks were staying off the front because this team Nature's Path would have all 20 of their riders near the front most of the time and immediately jump on every attack as if they were riding for Mark Cavendish in the field sprint. The course was narrow and the race wasn't fast so there was a big fight for positioning and it took a lot of energy to stay near the front. With two laps to go I was riding behind Chris Mcmillan and he just started coasting in front of me but there were riders on my right and left so I couldn't move so I just got shuffled straight to the back. With one lap to go I wanted to attack and maybe catch people by surprise but I was way at the back and the roads were too narrow and bumpy to move up in time. On the bumpy uphill section I peeked around and saw Justin riding near the front on Jose Nunez wheel, who is a good sprinter from Mabra. This gave me new encouragement and I made a big effort to ride straight from the back to front in about ten seconds on the left side. I got on Justin's wheel and we were gradually moving farther up towards the front where team Nature's Path had about four different lead out trains swerving all over the road. Jose pushed his way into one of the lines in fifth position so Justin got stuck out in the wind and I tried to come around him but now it was too late and we were almost at the last corner so neither of us got anything in the sprint.