Ahhh, back to Tucson after a tough day on Sunday up on the Sunset circuit race in Redlands. After Saturday afternoons disco crit I was looking forward to a few hills to thin the field out a bit. I despise getting hooked by jits trying to take your wheel. Blah. Sunday’s circuit is fairly hilly with some tight corners and an overall technical course. Aggressive racing from the get go with United taking quite a few hits at HealthNet. HN set up shop on the front and rode a quick tempo to try to discourage attacks. Baldwin put in some serious attacks and managed to form a small break group, HN sent Moninger across to the break to keep an eye on things while HN maintained a nice tempo in the field to limit the break’s gap. I decided to sit back and follow O’neill around and wait til later to give it a go. With 3 laps to go I put in a few hard digs on the climb and managed to break things up in the field a bit and initiated the serious chase to bring the break back. By this point HN only had Menzies and O’neill left, what I didn’t expect though was Menzies ability to absolutely motor on the front. When he started pulling our speed went up at least 5km/h. He was flying; up the hills, down the descents and through the corners. We quickly caught the break and then dropped back down to Redlands for the finishing crit laps. United did a nice job of controlling the circuits and delivered Haedo to an easy win. I ended up 8th, pretty happy with that. 3 more weeks til Georgia and I’ll be putting in some big days to try to polish the form a little more.