July

Since there weren't any real road races in July, I've focused mainly on track racing.

The NAS-Track UIV 3-day took place on July 4th - 6th. It was, without a doubt, the biggest race of my season. The competition included a whole bunch of riders from the USA U-23 National team, the Broadmark team, and some pretty fast Canadians.

Luke Cavender and I partnered for the weekend. We managed to avoid the crashes and came out in 4th place.




The 3-day really took a lot out of me. I turned myself inside-out trying to stay with the big guns. As a result, I felt really tired for the entire week following the 3-day.

Luckily, I had a family vacation in Canada planned for the week after that. I spent that week doing easier, longer rides past the hundreds of windmills on the Lake Huron shoreline. (Canada's really started to go all out with wind power. The air there is noticeably cleaner.)

I came back to Michigan to do a Sunday individual race at the velodrome and felt horrible. Long rides can be fun, but they really slow down your leg speed and high-intensity endurance. I won the sprints I contested, but I didn't contest many.

Last night, I raced in a NAS-Track Friday night race. Luke and Cruise Bogedin were paired together, so they had a pretty stacked team. I raced with Cody Brown. We missed an exchange after the sprint in the final Madison with 20 to go and a fresh Cruise attacked. Their team eventually took a lap on the field, but I launched off the front of the field right before they made contact. As a result, Cody and I remained on even mileage with Luke and Cruise, earning us an automatic 2nd place, even though points would have put us in 3rd.

Tomorrow I'll be racing in the mountain bike time trial at Stony Creek since there's pretty much nothing else going on around here. I'm looking forward to seeing how my fitness compares to some of the local MTB sceners.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.