Good weekend of bicycling

It was all kicked off Friday, when everyone at the shop biked downtown to watch the Minneapolis Crit of the NVGP. The Minneapolis crit is more a circus than a race, but it's always exhilarating to see the pros screaming through downtown. I think Tboughts got a little tired of hanging out with the boys all night, but she'll live.

Saturday I got up early and drove down to Mankato for the amateur race there. John Eppen came up for it and PeterO came down too. They set up the 4/5's, Juniors and Women together at the start line, so we all knew it was going to be a wacky race one way or another. Sure enough a couple juniors hammered it off the line and we all did our best to keep up. As things thinned out the top group shaped up. John, Peter and I were there and I was starting to like my chances. Eppen was putting the fear of God into everyone, taking monster pulls at the front and trying to break away whenever possible. A few other people kept trying to break away too, but I just sat in and tried to cover breaks when the opened in front of me. Its a 4/5 race, so I'm not sure why I even tried to cover a break since they never stick, but I did my work. About 2/3's of the way through the race, we started to catch lapped riders and everyone let up a bit, realizing the race would come down to the last lap. Sure enough, on the second to last lap, Eppen tried to get away when we came up to a big group of lapped traffic. I'm not sure how he was caught, because I got a little caught in traffic, but as we went through the finishing straight with one to go, I saw he'd cashed in his chips. Halfway around the lap, Peter tried to go, but it was covered. It had the inadvertent effect of setting up the MN JR team, so I just tried my hardest to grab one of their wheels. In the end I was 6th wheel out of the last corner, so I wasn't exactly where I wanted to be, but I was able to come around for 4th or 5th out of the group. It seems a couple of the people ahead of me were Jr racers, because I was second in the cat 4/5's, good enough for $40! That's the first money I ever made off a race. It turns out I preregistered for the race, forgot about it and registered day of too, so instead of making 25 bucks overall, I only made ten. Doh!

This morning, Jeebus and I went mtbing at Lebanon Hills. I haven't been to Leb in a long time and I've only been on the mountain bike a few times this year, but every time I go on a good ride in the woods I'm reminded why I fell in love mountain biking in the first place. I hope I can live someplace with some really great trails again sometime in my life.

Something cool I just discovered: Alessandro Petacchi's GPS data from the Giro.