I consider Snelling to be NorCal's season opener, so naturally, I had to be there. For those that don't know, Snelling is a flat, flat road race that runs 6 laps and about 75 miles for the P/1/2.

The wife and I arrived early and it wasn't long before we started hearing rumors of enormous puddles/lakes/secret fishing holes on the course. Would this year take us to Crazy Town or just Levanger again? I couldn't wait to find out.

Well, it was Crazy Town. Attacks, crashes, and hecka hard racing all put me deep into the box for the the first few laps.

Thankfully, a group of about 15 finally got off the front. Bissell had Danny Holloway up there and since he was riding a replica of Ben J-M's Pinarello training bike I was confident in his ability to win. This allowed me to spend the next 3 laps just sitting around talking to people while Chris Jones and Will Routley hammered on the front.

With a half lap to go, I attacked over the Merco finish hill with someone yelling, "No, Paul" from the field. But with a gap of still over a minute, I figured it was fair game to start racing again.

A little chase group formed with Phil Mooney, Will, James Mattis and some other dude. I never thought we could catch the break but it was splittering so we started picking people up.

At that point I backed off 'cause I wanted to let Holloway do his thing up the road. He did and won. I managed to somehow win the chase group sprint for 7th. After suffering so bad for the first few laps, I was pretty happy with the result.

And for those of you that skipped because of rain, it turned out to be a wonderful day, my wife even said she "got some color."