Rochester Crit

Doug's sister Robin's sister-in-law gave us a book on summer events in Rochester, so we looked at it last Friday night and saw that there was a bike race downtown on Saturday. We went to Sinbad's (sorry Dawn!) for supper and then decided to go check it out. We didn't really know exactly what it was or where it was, but we headed in what I thought was the general direction (not usually a good idea though Doug is somewhat familiar with downtown because of looking for places for us to live and I had looked at a map.) Anyway, we made it there easily, parked, and arrived on the course of the Saturn Rochester Twilight Criterium just in time to see the end of the women's race. Basically a crit is a short, technically difficult, road course that you ride for a certain length of time and then the officials decide when the race is over, i.e. the number of laps remaining, near the end of the race. It is apparently the most common type of bike racing in the US. The men, from all over the world, rode for 2 hours around the 1 mile course at about 30 mph. I thought it would get boring but it really didn't. We walked the whole course and saw the race from all different angles. At some points in the course, if you put your hand out, you could get your arm whacked off as the riders in the peloton rode by. An Australian won it in the end (which was weird because I had looked at the website earlier that day and he was the only rider whom I had read more about- he had the closest birthday to me). It was challenging to take pictures of because we were very close to fast moving objects in the twilight and night hours, but I like this picture that Doug took.