The 2 weeks before Lancaster has been pretty crazy, bouncing back and forth between lots of crits. My form is pretty good and I came into the race really excited for philly week. The race plan was for me to be patient and wait for the attacks at the end of the race, and then if it came down to a field sprint, we would lead out Marty Gilbert. About halfway through the race, I followed a couple of attacks and found myself in a very powerful 7-man breakaway. There was just one problem. Every other guy in the move was a faster sprinter than me. Our director Jonas Carney (JC) just had me rotate through doing the minimum amount of work that I could. Our gap never got higher than about 1:30, and we were caught with about 2-3 laps to go. Coming into the finish the pack was whittled down to about 30-40 riders and we had myself, Jackson and Marty left. There was lots of attacking in the final kms, and a small group of 5 guys was just a few seconds off the front coming into the final 1km. Jackson and Martin were together in the pack, and I came up to escort them to the front. I hit out with them on my wheel and just buried it until about 400m to go, where Jackson took over sensing the pack starting the swarm us. Jackson hit out hard and martin let the gap open up through the last corner. Jackson just nailed it for the final 300m and held on for the win.
It was an awesome feeling to win against all the big guns.