WALKERSVILLE

As most of you know the tour of walkersville was this weekend. I went into this race to just try and stay with the field. Welll i partially accomplished that. The neutral start and the first lap were really sketch there were 2 pretty bad crashes that i almost went down in. With me representing the ABRT juniors were Andrew, Aidan, and me. We were all closse to the back of the fiels during the neutral start and the first lap. After the last turn on the final lap there was a big crash with 5+ guys in it so me being right at the back got caught behind and so did andrew. I got on a chase group with a guy in a 53x11 kit and i believe and ncvc rider. I stayed with them for the better part of the second lap but they were just too strong so i hopped off to form up another chase group with andrew who was further back. With andrew were all of the juniors besides 3 so we were all working together the whole race. While andrew and i were trying to get the the first finish of our group by some luck all three of the juniors up the road dnf'd. one of them sadly was aidan who was having chain trouble and some how got lost which was disappointing of course. So andrew and i decided to try to lift the pace high after the last turn to try to pop off josh wilcox who was using a lot of energy the whole race. Andrew and i wanted to make sure we got into the final corner first and second so we could break up the group with our acceleration out of the corner. I went hard to get to the corner first and managed that but when i came out of the corner and accelerated hard josh was still there and andrew hard totally not even tried to accelerate like we planned. so i stayed on the front till the final 200 meters still trying to hold a high pace(i know tactical error but what ever) i managed that but with 200 meters to go 4 riders suddenly came around me in full sprint. I was in too high a gear to get it turning over quickly enough so shifted down and started the sprint. I passed a masters 55+ rider on the way to the line and got oh so close to the other 3 riders but couldnt make up the ground. I managed 4th and andrew held off an artemis rider for 5th. I believe that this 4th place finish while it might not seem like much was the confidence boost i needed to keep my focus and keep training for the races ahead. Mr. palmer got third in the cat 5 35+ race. I couldnt be there but aidan was a t tysons this morning and managed a 7th in the 15-18 jr category. Good work man. I also heard Chris brin finished well in the cat 5 race.