I had the opportunity this past weekend of racing in the Banff Bike Festival/ Stage race this past weekend.  The stage race consisted of a 21 km time trial, a 45 minute criterium and a 105km bike race.  The category ½ bike race hosted some of the top teams in western Canada.

The time trial went well.  I was hoping for a little longer of race as I seem to do better at the longer time trials.  I finished 11^th out of the 84 Cat ½ riders.  The orange Trek TTX was fast and turned a few heads.

The criterium didn’t go so well.  I was super paranoid about being involved in a crash do to my lack of criterium experience.  Well, I succeeded in my goal of avoiding any crashes, but that was because I was dropped and lapped out of this fast moving race pretty early.

As we moved into Sunday’s hilly road race, my role changed to that of a domestique for my teammate.  At 75km, there was a split in the field.  I spent approximately the next 20k trying to close the gap and pulling our team leader back to the lead pack.  The 84 start list had been reduced to an 11 man break away.  Unfortunately when it came to the last little hump in the race, I was blown and couldn’t go with the leaders, so I finished 40 seconds back but we succeeded in our goal of moving our Speed Theory club teammate Trev Williams up in the overall general classification into 9^th place. 

We were quite pleased after the race as it was both a team effort and the results were better than expected.  It’s been a while since I had done any true bike racing and was intimidated going into the race, but man was this ever fun.  The organization of the Banff Bike Festival was superb.