That Familiar Burn: Nighttime fun

Thursday I arrived in Des Moines, and Sean and I cruised on over the the local "race like a girl" training race. It was alright, short races, the longest being 20 minutes, the shortest being 2.
Nothing special happened, but it was a good warm up for this weekend.

Friday morning we cruised on down the road to St. Louis, MO to take part in the Gateway Cup. Four crits over the four day weekend.
The first of which started last night at 9:30. It was really quite strange to be warming up for a race when I am usually getting ready for bed. The course was pretty much flat, a little bit of elevation change, but nothing significant. It was nice and wide with mostly good roads, and only decently lit.
So at 9:30 all 121 racers took off for 75 minutes (plus 5 laps) of fun. I was about mid pack at the start and stayed there for 20 minutes or so while I adjusted to bike racing again. Eventually I found my lines and got the courage and the legs to start moving up. It took quite some time to get anywhere. On a few occasions throughout the race (after halfway) I managed to get to the front and I tried bridging up to random breaks. Of course all I managed to do was drag the field with me, but it was still fun to be up on the front of over 100 people. Just over halfway through my right contact got tired of the wind and decided to jump ship. That made the corners a bit harder, but luckily I had my lines all figured out so I just stuck to those. I was able to stay in the top 30-40 for pretty much the rest of the race. As the race wound down (and sped up) I was about 20th wheel or so for awhile. With 5 laps or so to go there was a crash on the outside going into a corner. On the 4th lap to go I lost my left contact, thus was nearly blind...With 2 laps to go some guy did not hold his line and cut the corner to much, bounced of me and the proceeded to cause a really loud crash.
The last lap all I did was try not to run into anything and hold my place. I estimate between a 30 and 40 finish place. It was a fun race, nighttime made it fun.