Greenbelt Park, MD Training Series Crit

I'm in MD right now on a business trip to Baltimore and having lived in the fair state of MD for like 10 years, I wanted to see if there was a crit that I could race since I missed the Westlake Worlds on Tuesday. I found one at the above and packed my Ritchey Ti 'Cross bike to check it out. The Crit take place in National Park about 12 miles north of Washing, DC (www.mabra.org & http://www.route1velo.com/), so when I got there, I checked out the 1.4 mile rolling loop and thought it would be a cool track to try. (Update) 55 B riders (4/5 & W3) showed up and as I was getting to the assembly area I saw what looked like Peter Sunderland...it was him, so we chatted a bit and then realized that we were going to be lining up at the very back of the 4-5 wide group. Damn. Peter said I'd be lucky to just pick my way up the group to get up front, so that was going to be my challenge for the night I figured. We started & I thought I saw off in the distance guys starting to move....that's how far back we were! Needless to say, riding 4-5 across with only 1 hard turn kept the field jammed. I kept looking for any opportunity to move up and by the 5-7th lap I was sitting pretty in the top 10. The field would jam down the hills at 30+ only to sit up at all of the little climbs....it almost drove me crazy - I ended up saying to myself (well, maybe out loud) screw this and went off of the front to push the pace up. I jumped at the start/finish and lead down the hill tucked into the tuck position loving the "open road feeling" and then through the rollers and figured I had enough fun and turned the race back to the locals and settled in the first 10-15. Towards the last 7 laps I saw that I needed to keep on the inside of the main decent going into the only "hard" turn, 'cause I didn't think it was too safe to be anywhere else on that turn. That turned out to be true when on the next few laps, A guy lost his back wheel while taking the outside, went down and took 4 others with him and split the field; I was 3 people on the inside of him and saw the whole thing. Whew. The rest of the race was just like before and at the bell lap I tried to get in decent position....the field slowed down AGAIN on the climbs and we did the old 4 across 200 meter sprint to the finish line. I was boxed in and then stuck behind a guy that clearly had no gas left in his tank for sprinting; that didn't keep him from standing up and throwing his bike all over the place. I finally got around him and picked off 2-3 more people and crossed the line in the top 12 spot.
It was pretty crazy, but a great race and one I would love to do on the Titus.
The stats:
1:17:03
29.3 miles
HR - 152 avg, 173 max
speed - 22.8 avg, 39.3 max
CAD - 102 avg, 127 max
1660' of climbing
32% spent in the "red zone"
temp started at 80'F and ended at 76'

*one water bottle was not enough.....

Thanks for reading,
Rick