Valley of the Sun was my first race weekend with Red Truck and stage racing in a while; I was eagerly awaiting the racing and sunshine. Sunday morning was the final stage of the weekend, the downtown crit! The time trial and road race were done, and our tummies were filled with lasagna from the night before.
We rode over to the crit for some warm up and had some trouble finding our way to the show, but eventually made it. We got ourselves set up and watched Dan Fraser-Maraun start his crit. As we warmed up along a strip of road near the race we could see him off the front early in the race (spoiler alert - it stuck!). It was fun to watch him race while we finished preparing ourselves for the crit by spinning and doing a couple sprints.
The starting field was a nice size of 40-50 girls, surrounded by a crowd and our other teammates who were racing later. While we were waiting to go we were told that there would be 18 primes throughout our 40 lap race, this was a bit surprising but exciting nonetheless. Our team had planned to keep the race fast paced but didn't have to worry about directing that because there were so many primes. Then the gun went off and we were on our way. I found myself somewhere in the middle of the pack behind some teammates as we went through and learned the corners of the figure-eight course.
I quite liked the course, it had lots of corners but was wide open and flowy with a relatively long stretch to the finish line. What felt like every other lap there would be a prime of three with 100 dollars on the line. This created some excitement and lots of attacks. I and my teammates attempted a few but often found that the long finishing stretch was too long for how we were positioned. Around mid-race there were two girls off the front and another girl attacked so I followed her and we stayed off the front a bit, which was fun, but inevitably got caught as the pack sprinted for prime money.
Throughout the race Brenna made strong pulls on the front and attacks. Sarah and Holly stayed right up at the front and I would often find their wheel so we could move as a unit. Coming towards the end of the race nobody had managed to stay off the front so it was all to come down to a sprint. With one lap to go I was on Holly's wheel three or four wheels back from the front and Brenna was ahead. In that lap I lost my spot but Holly managed to find Brenna and do a mega pull on the last lap, keeping the pace fast.
In the end Sarah managed to sprint off a few wheels and come in 2nd! I also sprinted but was mid-pack. I really enjoyed racing with the girls and working together. It was a great first crit of the year and filled with lots of learning experiences I'll take into the next races!