Well I was locked out at Hillsboro-Roubaix at Pre-Registration. So I was looking for alternative competition.

Sunday morning I was flying east on the Indiana Toll Road towards Ft. Wayne to a nearby town called Auburn, Indiana.

Early season "parking lot" criterium. The event was really run well. It was held off of I-69 at a WWII museum. The grounds were completely enclosed. The course was in the parking lot. There was also a lot of town roads for warming up sans rollers.

Course was basically two straightaways with four skinny corners.

Category 3 only had 8 riders. With this - my goal was to keep the race of 8 a race of 8. This means I would chase down most of the ridiculous garbage. Out of the 8 riders, 2 teams were represented. Three of us were with out teams.

As said I chased down a lot of attacks. I lead out from 2 to 1 one lap to go and watched the other 7 go by me. No worries.

M35+ had 19 riders. My goal was to lead, chase and hide appropriately. As usual with the masters races - a 4 man break succeeded. I basically lead when the pack wasn't in one line, chased down the opportunists looking for a 5th place finish and hid in the pack and waited for the next opportunist with 5th place glory. I repeated the same finish as I did the previous race.

In both races I got some good training, worked hard and made some new random friends.

All races had mid-size to small fields. My logic is that Ft. Wayne has 3 competitive teams. This means they other teams from Michigan, Ohio and Indy. The sketchy weather didn't look promising. Thus, not a lot of people wanted to drive 2 hours + to be greeted by a thunderstorm. The last 1/3 of the M35+ race the ground was wet. This was a good race and would recommend doing more races put on by 3RVS.

The time to travel was 3 hours but it was an easy 3 hours mostly on open toll road.