Montreal Stage Race - fast fast

Welcome to nighttime racing. Most stages started at 5:30 or 6:00pm -100k stages! The race started with a 32-corner 14k circuit that we did 9 times or so. It was faster than any race I’ve done all year. Positioning was the key and was majorly challenging for me. Hiroko was riding super well, hung in there. I got dropped, weary from too much sprinting out of corners. I chased for a whole lap through the caravan and caught back on, but came off soon after. Kathleen was dropped and in a group about 2 seconds ahead of me that she drove back onto the group, unaware I was right behind even though I radioed (she had evidently taken the radio out of her ear). I found this quite frustrating, a missed opportunity for teammates to help each other out. I was pretty mad to have been dropped so the next day I went on a suicide break about 2 miles into a 110k race. My gc was over and I just needed to assert I was there to race. Nobody really cared – the big German teams could pull anything back at will. I was hoping the lightning and torrential rain would work in my favor, but the course wasn’t technical enough. I stayed out there for 30k, then got caught and finished in the group. The race went on, short tt and crit in Little Italy, during both of which I suffered from apathy. The final day was pretty fun – I really wanted a break but nobody would have it, but considered the race a good training effort and did some quality caravan chasing as a result of wasting energy attacking. Judith Arndt of T-Mobile won to overall, rock star that she is.