Neil flew solo at Modesto Road Race and scored a nice top-5. Way to go. Below is his report.

Official Results
----------------------
Race: Modesto Road Race
Date: 5/18/2008
Temperature at finish: 100 degrees
Place: 4th out of 45ish
Category: P/1/2
Teammates: None

The day before the road race is the Downtown Modesto crit. With a start temperature of "only" 95 degrees. I was still pretty beat from being in the sun on Saturday. We were scheduled to do around 80 miles on a flat course that had plenty of turns and closed roads.

Daniel Holloway (VMG) showed, and BPG had a couple of guys. Chris Turner who has been having a pretty good year and is seemingly hitting some form (after helping lap the crit field the day before).

Rolling out in the high 70's at 8am. I wasn't sure anyone wanted to shoot off the front right away, but the attacks started soon enough.

My plan was to keep an eye on the heavy hitters and do my share of work in any break I might get in into. I ended up doing quite a bit of work throughout the day to bring back breaks and a few times I was in breaks.

I tried to get into three or four breaks, but they were not sticking. Most of the race seemed like a 3 hour crit, attack after attack -with all of them coming back.

On the 8th and last lap we skipped the feed zone and went heads down to catch the semi-break that was had been created four or five miles back.

After the break was caught McGuire went to the front and started controlling the pace of the peloton. We caught the 4's men with a mile to go and a few of them jumped into our race. The heat was starting to get to me and I was hoping I wasn't extremely sunburned.

I got caught up a little in the cluster and ended near the end of the peloton and had to make a few moves to get around to the front. The sprint was pretty intense and I dug in. I held on for fourth and Daniel got 1st.

An enjoyable day that was capped off by a very large burrito and a cerveza at a great little taqueria.

Thanks for Reading,
Neil