Tunis (Play by Play)

I think I may have made an intelligent decision skipping the road race - out of everyone I talked to, I only heard of one person who didn't get a flat. Assuming it doesn't violate some random rule, I'm really thinking about putting a rear derailleur and road cassette on the singlespeed and racing on it next year.
The crit was a different story though... It was on real pavement!
Going into this, I was a little worried about how I would fare. It was my "first" A race in a collegiate road event, and even though the field was small, it was pretty stacked. From the start everything was going good. Real early (second or third lap, maybe) a break of four went, with two MSU riders, one A+M rider, and Jordan from UT. With all the big schools represented, and only TCEH

without a rider up the road, we had no problem letting them go and sitting on the TCEH guys that tried to bridge up. At least until the break was about to lap us... With that added motivation, we all picked it up a bit, but they caught us anyway and the pace slowed back down a little.
Not wanting any part of this, Michael Carey performed the (patent pending) Scott Veggeberg Pack Splitting Maneuver and suddenly the largest group on the road had 3 people in it.
Heres a diagram of proper SVPSM technique:

I jumped into a group with Chad and Jordan (both up a lap) and an MSU guy. After a lap or so, Jordan signaled for me to attack, and figuring that there was a pretty well chance that he would be getting a better finish than me, I heeded the command. Soon after that he jumped as well, and upon catching me, I aided as much as I could in his (successful) effort to bridge to the next group up the road.
That took pretty much everything out of me, and I rolled around by myself for another 15 minutes or so, blocking non-UT people here and there. With five minutes/about 4 laps to go, I got pulled. Jordan ended up second though, so in the end, it was a good race for the team.
On the way back, me and Jacob stopped at Dairy Queen, and upon realizing we could have gotten "Spooner" action figures, we regretted not ordering kids meals...


Cliff Notes version:
Teamwork = Jordan gets 2nd place. I got pulled right at the end.