As a newbie to racing this year, my goals were pretty simple to start - finish a road race and a crit. I had my first chance at the crit finish last month, but flatted out of the race after 5 of 15 laps! But, I finally made my goal at the Hellertown Crit in PA on the 26th! And what a race it was!

Imagine...a course less than 1/2 mile in length...32 laps! As I told my friend Andy..."It's only 128 corners!" I had 6 other teammates at the race, so we thought we might be able to do some controlling of the pace and the race, etc. We knew that we had to watch out for one rider from Saucon Valley named Kristy (she rocks). As expected, Kristy attacked. As was NOT expected, she attacked from the starting line! She took off like a dag-gon bullet and we barely saw her for the rest of the race. At one point, she had 30 seconds on the pack (essentially a half a lap). We managed to pull her in to 11 seconds, but never quite catch her. As many spectators said afterwards, it was the best women's race they had ever seen. We worked our butts off the whole time. It was GREAT! I managed to finish 9th (just out of the money - they awarded cash for 1st - 8th place!), but we had 4 teammates in the top 10! All in all, a great race and a fun day! I can finally check that crit finish off my list of goals for the year...on to the stage race!