The women's 4's race split apart early. Our field has a really really strong girl- she's actually got enough points right now to get a mandatory upgrade, but she's never done a crit so they are not going to force her until she's got at least one under her belt - watch out after Walla Walla she'll probably be up with you guys! Anyway she went with 2 of her teammates, one of mine, and one other gal on the first climb. One of my other teammates and I weren't too far off, but when we all hit the flats they took off faster than I could chase.
We gathered up 4 people and were starting to organize a chase when the first of my teammates came back, just after she made contact with the break. I think she may have dropped her chain, but anyway she dropped back and helped us take up the chase. At this point we still weren't too far off of the break. Around corner 2 we spotted our other teammate up the road a bit. It took a while, but she finally spotted us and dropped back about 3/4 of the way through the first lap. After that we took up a bit of a team time trial to see if we could catch the break. We had 6 after all and they had 4...... wishful thinking, but it was still a good experience for us. For a while it was 4 of us and 2 gals from other teams that were actually first timers. We, I hope and think taught them a bit about rotating pacelines before they dropped off. It was good practice for us too, as few of the races have given us any opportunity to ride like that. So we TTT'd down towards the finish and then practiced doing a sprint lead out for one of our team mates.
We heard the original break dropped one rider and had about 3 min on us in the end. (did I mention they have a really really strong rider ), but who could complain, none of us would finish less than 8th (me - I figured I was the least likely to be able to out sprint any of my team mates so I volunteered to be the first lead out and thus last over the line and we wanted to allow our veteran rider to get the upgrade points so we practiced our lead out for her)