UCI 3 Cincy (UCI 1 Cincy for me)

This weekend was the famed UCI 3 Cincy Festival. UCI is the governing body of all disciplines of cycling world wide. Races that award UCI points are sought after by big pros because the number of UCI points they acquire determine their starting position in other UCI races which becomes crucial once they get to Europe later in the year for World Cup races. So the Cincy weekend offering 3 days of racing w/ UCI points to be won is very popular amongst top US pros and even some Euro-pros make the trip over.
I've only ever done all three races once. It was a tiring weekend, but more than that it was an expensive weekend. I guess it was a fun weekend too though. And I guess tons of people spend shitloads of money expensive vacations, so it's probably not really that bad...but I digress.


I decided to just do the Sunday race which is generally the most popular because, well, its Sunday and it's a great course. It's a hard course with several technical features including the uphill sandpit pic'd above (yes, the sand is tackled going uphill AFTER having been riding uphill on grass for ~1.5minutes. Brutal) But it also has a very fast descent and some long burning uphills. I'd say it's one of my favorite courses.
I'm not 100% sure how they figured the call-up's for the races, but I was the 2nd rider called-up so I got a sweet front row start.

I felt good and rode for a while in 3rd-4th-5th-ish position. As the cream rose to the top I ended up 8th, but had a good race for it. The course wasn't muddy, but there were some very muddy sections. It was the type of muddy that taking a pit bike probably would have been an advantage. If I had someone working the pit for me I probably would have swapped bikes at least once. As it were, I would have had to pit, find my other bike, drop my "a" bike, get my "b" bike, etc and it would have cost me time. I don't think a cleaner, lighter bike would have been worth it.

The good part of only using one bike is I only had one that looked like this (above) to deal with instead of two (well, technically I had to deal with Lindsay's muddy bike too, but still pitting saved me from dealing with a third mess).
I had fun racing and hanging out w/ friends while watching the pros duke it out. And maybe the best part of all is we get to do it again this weekend in Louisville. It's the USGP weekend in LV and we're going down for Saturday and Sunday. This is always a fun weekend with more top-notch pro racing to watch. Should be fun!