Bar H

I had heard it was going to be cold for the race this weekend, but I wasn't expecting 23 degrees...
Anywho, with it being that cold outside, I decided to call my warm up the ride to the start line. I spent a little too much time sitting in the car before heading over too, and ended up on the back row of people. That isn't too bad in itself, but coupled with the guy in front of me missing his peddle, I ended up with a pretty not good start. I was sitting towards the back for the first ten minutes or so (which is mostly jeep road), but when we got to the first climb and the people in front of me started jumping off of their bikes to push up it, I decided it was time to do something about where I was sitting in the group.
I cut some people off going up the first hill, and noticed there were still a bunch of people in front of me, so I started working on passing them too. And who would have guessed it, there were more people in front of them.
I had no idea what place I was riding in, but I was feeling good, so I just kept looking for more people to pass. All the way up until about three miles to go, I had a pretty steady flow of people going from in front of me to behind me. At that point though, I caught a friend who wasn't in my race, although I thought he was at the time, and spent the last couple miles trying to chase him down.
All in all, I ended up second (woo!), only 13 seconds out of first... I don't know if I could have made that up if I had known there was only one more guy to catch, but whatever, nothing I can do about it now. Hopefully I can have a slightly better repeat of this in two weeks at Cameron Park.