Brownstown Road Race

As promised from the last post, another episode of LCBC race reporting from this weekend's events. Even though storms crushed the Mid-Atlantic and Tour of Page County was handicapped by the damage from the wind, Joe Siegel made his way up to Lancaster, PA for some road race action in the Cat 3/4 Brownstown RR.

Joe in the breakaway at the Brownstown RR (c/o Julie Elliott)

Being a fairly short road race and a packed field of 80 racers, Joe assumed the pace would be fast, but found the peloton maintaining a mellow pace throughout the majority of the race. Weighing his odds, he knew he'd prefer to be in a successful breakaway than fighting for a position in a bunch sprint. Halfway through the race, Joe moved to the front of the peloton and laid down some work out of a turn to bridge up to a solo breakaway. A couple of other racers followed Joe's lead and they started working together to maintain their distance. After a couple of minutes, two racers quickly fell off the pace line rotation, leaving only Joe and another racer to work together. Unfortunately, the other racer didn't have much left in the tank to give and signaled to Joe that he had burnt his last match. At that point, Joe realized a one man breakaway was likely not going to last and rejoined the peloton.


With 3 miles to go, Joe found another opportunity to break away from the peloton. Attempting to lay down some serious watts, Joe tried to maintain his gap from the peloton, but was caught and consumed with 100 meters to go, overtaken by the anticipated bunch sprint and finishing in the middle of the peloton.

You can't win them all, but Joe played the best hand possible to try and create some results for himself. LCBC has the Hagerstown Crit teed up for next weekend and we look forward to another round of exciting and positive results!