Today was one of those days that I felt good all day. Unfortunately, I’m just one guy and by the end of the race, I didn’t have any teammates left – for a number of reasons, as you’ll read.

The 91-mile (138 km) race began in Downtown Redlands, ventured up onto the Sunset Loop course for 12 laps before returning to Redlands for five laps of the criterium course we raced the day before.

With two laps to go on the Sunset Loop, only about 40 riders remained in the lead group – and I was the only one from Team Type 1. A crash took out Valeriy Kobzarenko and Fabio Calabria while Moises Aldape had gotten caught out on the climbs and Ian Macgregor had two flat tires. Plus, we had started the stage with only five riders after Phil Southerland and Ben Brooks bowed out after Stage 1 and Shawn Milne crashed and broke his thumb in yesterday’s stage.

So When Rory Sutherland (Health Net presented by Maxxis) attacked, it created a split that left only five of us in front: Rory, Oscar Sevilla and Santiago Botero (Rock Racing), Alejandro Borrajo (Colavita-Sutter Home) and me.

Alejandro countered the move, the other guys just sat up and he rode away from us. I was feeling good so I went after him. When I caught up, we started working together well and got a 30-second gap right away.

Then, halfway through the lap, I don’t know exactly what happened but he told me he was going to stop working. I guess he must have talked to his director, who told him they had five or six guys behind and they wanted it to come down to a field sprint. So rather than wait to get caught, the next time up the climb I tried to dump him. I was hoping to stay away, but the group eventually caught up on the final time around the loop.

As we hit the circuit downtown, we were a smaller group but there were still a lot of good sprinters: Toyota-United’s Dominique Rollin, Sutherland of Health Net and Colivita, of course. So I knew if I was going to have a chance, I had to do something. With two laps to go, I saw a spot where I was faster than everyone else so I got a good run on the turn and gave it a go. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, but it was better than just sitting there and rolling in. I can only imagine what would have happened had Ian not had his bad luck with flat tires or had Shawn been in the race.