My report from the Team Oregon forum:

I’m glad we had a morning race. It’s hot out for everyone racing right now. The 4s race was fairly non-eventful. The first lap was moderate pace and I sat 10th-20th wheel most of the lap. Most of the second lap was painfully slow save for the longest climb which had several hard accelerations and threatened to split up the field before the front of the race sat up. Coming into the third lap, I was feeling very fresh and was ready for the large climb the final time. I guessed it would be the only possible place a break might get away for good, which turned out to be the case. There was never a major attack, but the pace at the front was very high and eventually a group of 8 of us got a gap with lots of smaller groups chasing.

The break has to be the worst organized break I’ve ever been in that somehow worked anyway. We had less than 30 seconds gap for quite a while with a chase group of 10 or so and a main field still in sight of probably 15. With Pat and I in the break, Team O was the only team with two riders in the lead group. Pulls were disorganized and not smooth at all. I don’t think we ever managed a full rotation through the 8 of us without some sort of disruption in the paceline. I started to cramp pretty badly with about 5 miles to go and dug in pretty deep just to hold on. There is a short steep riser before the finishing climb that I finally lost contact on, but so did two other riders. I managed to get clear of them and nearly caught back onto the break, but never quite caught them before they hit the base of the finishing hill. From there it was using my bodyweight to get the pedals to turn because my legs were starting to freeze up. I finished probably 100 yards back of the leaders but managed to hold off the others for 6th place. I’m pretty happy with that given how much it hurt. A top 5 next week means an upgrade!