My last race of the road season was the TD Bank Mayor's Cup up in Boston. My trip to and from was quite an adventure, and it was the only USA-Crits/NRC race I did all year.

I flew up from BWI via Air Tran. I did not get away with carrying a bike along, but I was charged a "reasonable" $85. Our flight was turned around when we were somewhere over New Jersey, because the landing gear never retracted, and they would only have a spare plane at BWI, not at Boston. As a comp, they announced that everyone aboard would receive a free round-trip ticket to anywhere AirTran services. Sweet!

Landing at about 8.00, I took a cab to the train station (which was within reasonable walking distance to the race course), and took a nap. Sleep didn't really happen, but I needed to rest my legs from all the airport time. Once time came around to where registration would be open, I took a 15 block walk with my bike to the course. AMAZINGLY, as I was saying hello to the registration volunteers, none other than Ramon showed up! He hung out while I assembled my bike, and then we hung out at his hotel room. We managed to kill the hours by exploring for food and watching some bad TBS aired movies, then got kitted up and prepped for the race!

I had a shitty, shitty staging spot. The back. To make matters worse, guys back there were grabbing fist-fulls of brake, so It was basically like a technical cat 3 crit. The race was brutal for me back there. I felt awful, coming all that way only to struggle to survive...I kept telling myself "You aren't done yet, when you pop it is going to be an explosion, not a whimper." I tried and tried to surge up the field, but I kept getting shut out of the field, or caught up in a field-fold. At about the 50:00 mark, I made a suge that worked! Suddenly, I felt fine and the race was EASY. There was a break of race-winners up the road, but what did I care, I was sitting on Karl Menzies' wheel! (No joke, I was). About 5 laps of up-front time went by and I started licking my chops for the finish. If the rest of the race went this way, there would be a payday for me! That very lap, two Richmond Pro guys came through and wanted me to give way so they could go for a preme. I obliged and let them through, thereby getting blocked out of the field and into the wind, only to find that the two guys pretty much crashed into the barricades about 50 meters up the road, causing a MASSIVE field fold, and putting me at the back again. That's pretty much how the race ended: I finished, but without a notable result.

After the race, I packed my bike up, took a shower, and walked back down to the trainstation. I rode the train through the night back to D.C. where I took the metro home, exchanged bikes, and drove out to the Lilypons CX race. It was friggin' muddy, and my birthday. I did poorly, but had fun!