9 am is a bit to early for a road race by my standards. Tour de Toona is somewhat different in that the womens race seems to be the highlight of the event even though virtually every mens pro team in the US is here with their A squads. The woman get to start their races later and have a larger prize purse.
The stage today was in Johnstown about one hour from Altoona. The town is considerably nicer than Altoona and situated nicely in the heavily forested hilly terrain of west Pennsylvania. Besides being visibly nicer this town also has a coffee shop which in our current situation boosts its image considerably.
The circuit race today was only 100 km with three laps of a rolling circuit making the distance. 186 riders took the start today and from the gun the pace was very high. HealthNet spent most of the day on the front protecting Menzies who is currently sitting in yellow. I wanted to stay out of trouble so I rode close the front the entire day, spending a good portion of the first lap tagging on the back of the HealthNet train scoping things out. Although the speed was high the effort was not bad at all and after 2 hours and 14 minutes I figure I finished in the top 60 with Nick and Jamie just behind me. The average speed on the day was 47km/hr which I believe brings it into a tie with a race in Belgium as the fastest race of the year. As a comparison GasTown was only 45km/hr as is one of the fastest crits in North America.
Tomorrow is the first real test of the legs with a 150 km point to point road race taking in two substantial climbs. I am looking forward to this one to test the form and move up on GC. Only the top 100 riders after stage 6 get to start the stage 7 crit so that is a bit of an incentive.
Stay tuned for more action from PA and hopefully some pictures soon.
Full coverage and results of the race can be found at www.tourdetoona.com, cyclingnews.com is also covering the race with pics.
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