Tour de 'Toona - Stage 1

This past weekend was the 3-day Tour de 'Toona points race in Altoona, PA. Keith, John, Brady and myself made the trip out along with a bunch of other team folks racing in various categories. 'Toona is a very fun race, albeit a bit hard to ensure that you place well on GC because the overall is based on points, not time, which means that you have to place top 15 in every stage to get a high GC finish. Rolling in at the back of the lead group and getting the same time as the winner won't help you at all here.

So we go into the first day: a 40 mile rolling-course circuit race. My legs were feeling very twingy beforehand; like nothing I've ever felt before. I didn't really know what was up with that, so I got in a bit of a warmup and started the race. The pace was very fast most of the time, but the race was short enough that no one was willing to let breaks get away. I still managed to cover a couple of breaks that looked dangerous, but for the most part tried to conserve energy. Coming into the long straight before riding into town, Keith rolled back to pull me up to the front of the pack for the finish. The problem was, however, that nobody was leading out on the straight, and so the whole pack was packed together across the whole road. Keith tried moving us up on the left; dead end. We pulled out of there and tried moving up on the right; dead-end. It kept on like this all the way into town, there was just no room to move up. Once we hit the town blocks the pace picked up and it was single file criterium-style to the finish. I was too far back to get any points for the stage, and that spelled the end of my GC aspirations at the Tour de 'Toona. Bummer.