The day started off sitting on the line behind Lance watching the weather roll in. Not 30sec after the start Bryan Bunch of Herring Gas crashed, going over the handlebars after running into another rider.  The neutral was even fast this year, one of Lance’s buddies had a Trek Mountain bike with road bars and components, if he had had trispokes I would have mistaken him for RW. As soon as the neutral went off Lance and his boys just blew apart the lead pack, anyone who tried to stay with them were just blown off, I’m talking mile 1 of the race. I saw this going on and decided to just ride my own race and baby my bike as much as possible.  On the first dirt decent, Power Line (the same place I destroyed my front tire last year), it was raining, and the decent was extremely dangerous and very cold. I took it very easy and did not care about all the guys that were passing me. Even as slow as I was going I still don’t know how I did not crash a couple of times. But I soon got it in my head that this was going to be a very tough day, but my kind of day.

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