Dan Seymour and I teamed up to Race The Red River again this year on Monday evening.  The weather stunk all day, but improved greatly the minute we got on the water.  In the photo above, Marilyn Lalibert and Jenny Aune were the only all women's team and learned quickly how to navigate the river.  4 miles south against the current, 6 miles north with the current makes for a long boat ride.  Danno and I took 21 minutes off of our time from last year due in part of using John Struchy's high tech carbon canoe.  We figured it shaved over 30 pounds off of the old reliable aluminum canoe.Danno is racing the Chip Tri this weekend and needed the practice.  Big time improvement over last year hitting the tangents on the curves like pro's.  It would have been cool to have a lot more competitive canoes in the water but it was fun to hold onto the team that had won it 7 years in a row.

Wednesday afternoon, Craig Lemiuex, Chad Weisgram and his boys Tyler and Spencer along with Ben and Matt made our way down to watch stage 2 of the Nature Valley Grand Prix in downtown St. Paul.  Stage two for the women is a 40 lap burn through the tight corners of an 8 city block circle, 45 laps for the men.  Each lap was extremely intense to watch as the bikes are reaching almost 40 miles per hour.  Tactics are the name of the game with the teams rallying for position and doing what they can to hold on.  If you are too slow, you get pulled from the race.  Mens race had a group of 4 pull off the front as much as 26 seconds for most of the race.  Adam Bergman from the Texas Roadhouse team was up front the whole time but crashed with two laps to go.  In my opinion, Adam had a good chance to win.  Report was that he clipped a pedal on the street causing him to go down.  Road rash, but he was racing stage 3 today.  Check the web page for results.

Kriston Armstrong, leading women's pro rider and gold medal time trial winner in the Beijing Olympics was racing in fine form.   

Craig and Pat pre-race.  Pat had his game face on and raced extremely well.  He was in the main group the whole race.  Craig said it is a tough hour to watch your kid racing like that with the speeds, bikes inches apart and all of the shenanigans going on in the pack.  These guys are pros with the experience that shows.  

Long day for sure as we motored down and back.  Craig is heading back down tomorrow (Friday) to watch the last three stages.  Fine racing for sure.  Rick Laliberte is heading down to race the citizens classes and will be competitive as usual.  More information forthcoming this weekend.