Luke smashed it today

This was my first Westlake of the year. Kind of an intersting field. Bob Martin came out of retirement. Todd Howman was back from injury/complete destruction of his CAAD10 (his new VYNL is hot). Newly crowned state road race champion Robert Sroka was there to kick heads in but we were missing Paul and there was no sign of Jeff.



I felt pretty good in general but got to the race late and didn't have time to get a good warm-up in. I used the first two laps to ease into the swing of things and then started doing some work. I covered a lot of early moves but couldn't quite get something to stick. About halfway through there was a field split followed shortly by a crash. We ended up with a group of about 12 with all of the usual suspects in it. Chris and Luke managed to get into a move with James, Brian, and Bort at about 9 to go and I thought that was the one but Robert attacked out of the break, those guys came back to us, and Robert lost interest in riding solo a couple laps later. Reshuffle.



The pace was pretty high after it came back together. At 5 or 6 to go Rudy got off the front, I bridged to him with Batke, and Stu. The 4 of us had a nice rotation going for 2 laps. Then Robert joined us. Our quintet didn't last very long. Half a lap later everything came back together. James and Weeks countered, Luke and Brian made it across with Robert and that was the move that stuck. 



Chris and I chased hard for the next two laps but there wasn't really reason to do so other than to get a workout in. All the money was up the road and other than Robert, Luke shouldn't have had too much trouble with the other members of the break. Turns out he didn't. He got second. Awesome job Luke.