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Saturday was the All City Championships in Minneapolis.  I got up early to do some work stuff, but wrapped that up around noon ate some lunch and headed to Magyars. He had already gone through and mapped the announced checkpoints and despite the fact that we knew their would be surprises the race looked like it might be a bit shorter than we had imagined.  Anyway we hopped in the car and met up with Andy in Anoka, all three of us piled in and got downtown and got our stuff together.

At One on One we met up with my friend Justin who was fresh back from a cross country tour he finished up just that week, then we went to register which raised a whole bunch of questions when a second manifest wasn't handed out.  Then with about half an hour before start time they finally handed out manifests.  Suffice it to say that the manifest stretched out our initial mileage two fold and involved a ton of back and forth, 4 pick ups to be completed in order and drops, a crosstown hustle with a sealed manifest, and another few checkpoints.  I was totally dumbfounded so I just let Mags do the routing and waited for the start.  Le Mans style start sent everyone scrambling and then we hit the road.

Justin zipped up and rode with, which was awesome to have another person with some sense of direction along, seeing as how I was just pointed in a direction and went. Andy dropped off and it ended up just being us three. The rest of the race is a blur. Normally I am a pretty law abiding cyclist. Their really isn't enough of a rush or traffic to necessitate being lawless in a city like Eau Claire.  That said I love racing alleycats because all of that goes out the window.  Their is nothing like riding with confident strong riders through any and every obstacle imaginable.  Words can't describe the feeling you get doing a race like this, you just need to do it.  Anyway, by race end I was getting pretty spent, and Mags and Justin were still just killing it, we rolled into Peacock Groove after about three hours and around 40 some miles we ended up coming in 50somethingth.  Which I am totally happy with for a couple out of towners who lost half an hour in routing, and stopped for a beer during the race. For convenience sake we both brought fixed gears, which I think might not be the plan next time.

We grabbed some beers and hung around the Twin City Framebuilders Cooperative for a bit checking out toally awesome bikes before running over to Pizza Luce for a couple slices. 

Again, the rest of the night is kind of a blur. Andy got there and we all drank a bunch of free Surly, looked at bikes, and after much effort got a shirtless dance party started.  Found out lots of people in Minneapolis are a little more reserved in their dancing and shirt wearing than us Wisconsin folk. But all that aside we met a ton of very cool, very nice, very fun people who showed us some big city bike riding hospitality. 

We got back to Andy's around 2am and with no beer to be had we all hit the sack hard.  Got up had a mega breakfast and headed back home.  Totally awesome weekend and can't wait to do it again. Mega thanks to all the neat people we met, come to our next race and we will repay the favor.