Enumclaw

Looong drive up to Seattle to crash with Jordan from UW (thanks man!), then race Enumclaw. Saturday morning TT - did a mediocre ride and that was that. Then I drove around and sat in various places doing school work until the 730pm crit.

The crit... was a sh*t-show. The rain started dumping down, cold, during the cat 3 race and those guys were sliding all over the road. The downtown course is an 8-corner, figure 8 type of thing with manhole covers in just the right places and a few bumps that make it pretty safe if you pick your line well, but sketchy when guys touch their brakes in corners or move a few inches off the line. So I was on the fence about trying to finish and after the first pile-up on lap 2 or 3 I thought "this is pretty dumb" and stuck to the field until 10min were up, then let go and rode around just hard enough with some other guys to make it another 10min and then sat the hell up. 25min ride, pretty chill, totally safe, and no issues. Now, purposely getting pulled is a bit controversial as a strategy but the way I look at it, I'm not in GC contention, I've got no-one to work for and bike racing isn't my job, so what would the purpose of finishing be? All I really wanted was to get through and ride the road race.

The road race was a blast, but selective and hard. It was basically on flat roads with on longer climb, a flat ridge up top, and a high-way descent. And some wind. I think we rode 50-54km/hr until the base of the climb on the first of five laps. On tight, one-lane country roads some of which had no centerline so the moto kept riding next to us honking and yelling. Then we hit the climb, and McKissick and some others set sail and people started blowing up all over the place. It regrouped, then went at a more reasonable pace for the next four laps but still kept spitting guys out the back every time up the climb until the final field had maybe 40 riders - we started with 93. Then the finish came super fast again on tight roads back to the crit course and I just rode in. All in all a good race though I didn't do so much.