The crit course was super easy three corner mile long course. One corner being a half roundabout that could be taken decently fast and the other two corners being 90 degrees with manholes and pavement changes throughout. Pre riding the course all I could think was gee thats a lot of hay bails in turn 2. The race was easy with the course being relatively flat and wide it was easy to move up and all the corners could be taken pretty fast. Me and Will knew it would come down to a field sprint just by the layout of the course but that didn’t stop us from showing ourselves near the front. I was in a small move or two early on but decided my energy would be better spent keeping Will near the front in the last couple of laps. Will was awesome at keeping position near the front but me on the other hand I constantly had to be moving up on the outside or getting that line through the corner where I could pick up a couple of spots by going through a corner faster than some of the other guys. With two laps to go I was sitting ~20th wheel, I realized that with it being such a open and easy course that we just wern’t going fast enough. The kudzu guy were on the front but they wern’t going as fast as they should have been, going into the second corner people were trying to go into it four wide. Will was sitting ~7th wheel and got pushed into the hay bails, being the first to go down. After him forty plus people tumbled, I had people sprawled out in front of doing 30+ and could do nothing but hit them. getting up the first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t put any weight on my hip so I got my bike and sat down. The medics came to check me out but I was pretty sure I was ok.after sitting therefor a couple of minutes I was able to hobble over to the medical tent to realize I had two elbows and was bleeding pretty bad, the medics cleaned me up and gave me some ice packs for my hip.
After the race Will and I nursed our wounds with a few beers and watched the mens pro race. Tomorrow is a 16 hour drive back to charlotte.
Upcoming races will be the Piedmont triad omnium next weekend, french broad the next, corssroads the next week and a half then a build up to green mountain.
