Andre's Racing Blog: Weekend Race Report

Saturday
I headed down to fork shoals with Frank and Erica to race in the cat 4 race. With high hopes of winning and being to upgrade to cat 3 the team said they would help me out if all things worked out well. Well lets just make this one short. Things didnt work out to well for me. At the start of the race the official said that the field was 189 strong. I thought "wow thats insane". By the second lap it seemed that half the field had fallen off. On the third lap there was a guy up the rode by one minute and the field started hammering to catch him. People started falling off the back left and right. I found myself struggling to hand on. My lower back was really hurting me. I eventually did fall off the back and tried so hard to catch back on. I caught plenty of people a long the way who had fallen off. None of them which could hang with the pace I had going. I was disappointed for getting dropped but looked forward to racing on Sunday.

Sunday
Sundays race was much much better than Saturdays race. I did the Junior race today because I was going to be going to a Puddle of Mudd Concert in Charlotte. More on that later. So at the start of the race Evan Wynn and I were at the front setting the pace at a nice tempo. We eventually let a team from Salisbury do some work. At the end of the second lap Josh Antley attacked and Evan got right on his wheel. I sat in the pack and waited to see if anyone was going to go after him. After I saw that no one was going to go after him I attacked on the outside to try and bridge up to Evan and Josh. at 30 mph and a super hard effort I managed to get up to them. next thing I know and was expecting anyway was AJ Meyer came up to the break. AJ is a super strong cat 2 Junior. Before I knew it the 4 of us crossed the start finish line with one lap to go and we had a good gap on the field. We worked together really well until AJ decided to attack about 2 miles into the 3rd lap. With his attack it made josh fall off the back and left Evan and I chasing after him. To make a long story short AJ won the race. I spent the entire third lap trying to catch Evan who was about 5-10 seconds up the road from me. Josh ended up catching up to me with 1 kilometer to go and road my wheel to the sprint and out sprinted me by less than a bike length. I ended up getting 4th on the day but was very happy to be part of a breakaway.