This past weekend I raced the Folsom Cyclebration Omnium to get three hard days of racing in two weeks before Junior National Championships in Augusta, Georgia. The first day was a time trial, which was the first time I ever raced a flat time trial, and my fourth ride and first hard ride on a time trial bike. Surprisingly I managed to get 7th out of about 25 racers. Saturday was the criterium, and I was looking for more omnium points to add to my 15 from the time trial. With about 5 laps left a dangerous looking break went up the road, so I took the effort to bridge the 10 or so second gap to the leaders. When I got to the break it started to blow apart and I made the split with three other riders coming into three laps to go. By the time we came around for two to go it was just a lone rider and me with a 25 second gap to the peleton, as the lead out trains started to form our gap was down to just 10 or 15 seconds with a lap to go. All it would have taken for our breakaway to succeed would have been for the powerful Leadout Racing team's leadout train (team name is a little coincidental right?) to have hesitated for 5 seconds before opening up the throttle. But no such luck as my companion and I were swept up in the last 1/3 of a lap. The last event on Sunday was the circuit race which after the previous days failure I was pessimistic about the chances of a break away, but then I was wrong and 4 people got off the front and stayed away until the finish.
Coming into National Championships this leaves me with the lesson that cycling can be a gamble, and that you have to make your own luck, because if you don't try you can never know.
Thanks for reading,
Jason S
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