Race Report: McLane Pacific Cycling Classic, day 1 crit.
Today was my first race of the season.
There were about a gozillion women in the Pro 1/2 field today. All the fast girls showed up, a lot of the same faces, just sporting different jerseys for new teams in 2006. Of course, I wasn't sporting a new jersey because our new stuff isn't in yet.

Got tea? My only highlight of the day was getting the hole shot for the first lap. As you can see I positioned myself in a little Lipton Tea mixer so I could go for my customary sprint from the gun start. After leading it out for a lap, I resigned myself to playing tailgunner most of the day. It wasn't really by choice, I just lacked the gonads today to dive bomb the corners, move up, and stick some elbows to some people to stay up front. About the only thing I worked on today was mastering the free lap rule. I got caught up in a couple of crashes today and while I could have tried a lot harder to keep it upright, I decided just to lay it down and take my free laps.

I'm staying with Kate Gracheck this weekend. She raced in the 3/4 race earlier this morning. Here she's second wheel coming through the RedBull chicane... by the way this was the location of all 3 of the crashes I was invovled with (I only layed it down twice though because the last one was with 4 to go, so no more free laps, so I decided to keep it upright).