Second attempt at the local Thursday night crit, A race. 30 1-mile laps, sprints every three laps. Two weeks ago I'd felt totally spent during the entire race, probably because I wasn't using my efforts wisely - so the mission for today was to stick with the pack more easily, and let everything else come as it might. Mostly successful - I was nowhere near contention for the sprints in the first half of the race, but felt pretty good staying in the front one-third of the bunch. Still found myself in no-man's land a few times, stuck between a few attackers whose wheels I failed to latch onto and the main pack - but didn't waste as much energy in those situations as before. On one of the later sprint laps, I jumped before the last corner when three others went, and made it across the line in fourth place - or so I thought. Turns out there was a guy up the road, so I didn't get that one point I was hoping for (hey, I'll take table scraps for now). On the second-to-last lap, I was ahead of the pack with another guy when there was a loud noise behind us. Not sure what it was, so we kept going and caught up to the two guys off the front after the bell. This was starting to look like a chance for some points on the final lap - when they waved us down. Big crash happened on the back stretch, a good number of racers went down - mostly road rash, but one was taken off in an ambulance, probably a collarbone fracture or separation. I felt pretty good about this race - too bad it ended on a down note.