Racing at home

This weekend Western Michigan hosted 2 races here in kalamazoo. First of all, it was awesome not to have to travel to race. I got to sleep in, see my family and race in front of a home crowd. The saturday race was a long 85mile road race just south of Kalamazoo in Schoolcraft. The course was a flat wind section set to the background of farms and golf courses. Unfortunalty the wind was not quite as stong as i was hoping so the race wasn't hard enough. Only about 4 of the strong guys from our conference showed up including Jake Rytlewski, Jon Swain, Brandon Gavic and myself. The rest of the field ended up racing the typical long collegiate road racing style which is race as negativley as possible, chase down all the strong guys and let the lesser riders ride away with ease. It was so frustrating that Jake and Jon actually quit the race about half way into it. finally with about 35miles to go i forced a break by digging really really deep. Fortunalty it worked, but the downside was that i went a little deeper than i really wanted to go. I ended up getting 7th in the race which i felt was a pretty poor result considering how strong i felt. On sunday we had a 13lap circuit around our college campus. We have great terrain on our school grounds with 2 nice steep hills per lap about 3miles total per lap. On the second lap of the race, I attacked with Jake, Jon and Brandon and we got a huge gap in a hurry. We were really going hard in that break. Jake and Jon were both really frest from not finishing the previous day, not to mention they are lighter by 30lbs and better climbers than i am. Brandon is all of 130lbs and goes up hill pretty well himself. Jake attacked pretty hard on the finishing climb with 6laps to go and i couldn't go with the move. I chased as hard as could for as long as i could, but ended up getting caught with a few laps to go. I was pretty toasted by this point and struggled to try and finish with the group. The best news of the day how well jeremy raced. He performed great and finished what i think would be his hardest race yet. He also finished well the day before in the long road race. I think he is starting to come around. I have next weekend off because of Easter and the following weekend is regionals in Illinois. Thanks for reading.