Decided not to race my team's home stage race this year, so I worked registration and drove the wheel truck for the P/1/2/3 and Cat 5 races. It was the first time I got to watch an entire race close up while not being part of it. The course was a 15 mile loop in a rural area with different numbers of laps for each cat. The P/1/2/3 race was fast but somewhat boring; a few one or two man breaks that never stuck, yellow line rule strictly enforced the whole race since the course was open to traffic. One guy decided he needed to move up anyway about a km before the finish and crossed the yellow line almost into the rear fender of an oncoming duallie - the moto ref was behind the peloton because of the oncoming traffic. My race caught the Master's race on the last lap and the two pelotons intermingled for a while, rather than the Master's self-neutralizing; took some effort from the moto refs to sort that out. Bunch sprint at the end.

The Cat 5 race was slower but had the usual huge spread of abilities, so a break went off never to be seen again. Got to see my first in-person bikes-whirling-through-the-air crash, too, on a clear, open straight. Unfortunately, it included a teammate, the second-oldest guy on our team (I'm the oldest); a couple of guys crashed themselves ahead of him and he had nowhere to go. Apparently the worst injury was bruises, but my friend's helmet was visibly totaled from a hard impact on his head, and he went to the ER for a precautionary cat scan. At one point the peloton was doing ~18 mph into a slight headwind, and I wanted to yell at them to get the lead out. Looks like the same group of guys pulled almost the whole race.

Pretty much fun overall.