By Bryan Moritz
4/22/2007

and yet again, another college race done for me...went out to lincoln nebraska friday night to race against the midwest colleges...it was the lincoln plating race courses...not sure if any of you have done them before, but the road race on saturday is a 12 mile rolling course around a big lake out there...the wind was WICKED strong out of the south (25-35 constant wind with 50 gusts) so that definitely made the race interesting. my race was 60 miles of that crap...UGH

with one lap to go, local boy sean noonan put in an attack and the remaining pack was SHATTERED...unfortunately i wasn't in position to get into the break and he and 2 other guys (one of them being the reigning national collegiate crit champ mark smelser from kansas state) and so they took off. soon i was in the chasing group but we had no chance of catching up, so i just sat in and drafted for the rest of the race hoping to play it right and sprint for 4th overall. however, the finish line wasn't on the course for every lap (they had us circle the park for our 5 laps and for the finish we turned INTO the park to go to the finish line) so i wasn't exaclty sure where the finish was (which was around a corner and you couldn't see exactly how far it was until too late) and two guys took off and so i was caught off guard and took 3rd in our group, 6th overall in the collegiate As. however, for that being a 60 mile race, that we still managed to average over 20mph with those crazy winds, i was pretty happy.

and today was the crit...it was really short though...only 30 minutes for us, so that kind of sucked...but what sucked worse was the weather...immediately after getting to the course in our van, it started pouring and thundering. but the lightning stayed away and we still had our race. it rained the entire race and half of the time i couldn't see out of my clear lenses. the course was pretty cool...2 mile loops with about a 300 meter uphill finish that wasn't incredibly steep.

on the first lap, some guys put in an attack goign up the hill and i anticipated it so i was able to make the lead break that stuck. there were about 9 of us. some guys would put in their random attacks but nothing stuck. my friend jake boyce started an attack with 15 minutes left, and so i quickly jumped on his wheel and pulled through telling him we had a gap, but he wasn't feeling the greatest and didn't get on. so i was off the front, and stayed away for the rest of the lap, but knew it wouldn't stay so i sat back up. coming up to the finish, i was sitting in the back of the group of 9 (dumb place to be, bryan!) and 4 guys on the front attacked halfway up the hill and so i was trying to sprint to catch up, but wasn't able to get up to the 4th place guy and had to settle for 5th...oh well.

overall, i thought it was pretty good weekend of results seeing as the weather was pretty horrible.

next weekend is the conference championships to finish up our season of racing and to see who from our conference gets to go to nationals. as of right now, i believe i am in a qualifying position. nats this year are going to be down in lawrence kansas may 11-13...it's supposed to be an 80 mile road race and i could DEFINITELY use someone in the feed zones for water and whatnot...so if any of you are looking for a trip :)