By Ralph Schroeder

Mark your calendars, the Prairie State Cycling Series will be one of this year’s premier race series. We got a sneak peak into the venues and here’s what the race will hold for us this year: • July 17th , Wednesday - the Sharon Cycling Classic (RR) (Sharon WI) • July 18th, Thursday - The 11th Annual Beverly Hills Cycling Classic criterium (Beverly) • July 19th , Friday- The Elmhurst Cycling Classic criterium (Elmhurst) • July 20th Saturday - The Northwestern Medicine Lake Bluff Criterium (Lake Bluff) • July 21st, Sunday- Sammy’s/Dreyer St. Charles Criterium (St. Charles) Prairie State Executive Director Marco Colbert explained that the Prairie State series is under the same organizing group behind the Tour of America's Dairyland, which speaks well to it being a quality run event. He is genuinely amped about being able to build off of last year’s success in St. Charles and Lake Bluff, and make the 2013 PSCS bigger and better. His promotion group saw a wide-open, some would say gaping, hole in the race calendar, so they jumped on the opportunity to extend the Prairie State program. USA Cycling validated their hard work and awarded the series slots on the National Criterium Calendar. We’ll have more on the race venues and from our conversation with Marco in a later post, but it is really interesting to get a behind the scenes view into race promotion. Marco and his team have a real passion for cycling – these are the guys making our race days happen so let’s do whatever we can to support them, not the least of which is to just show up and race. The Prairie State Cycling Series runs from July 17 to July 21 – and they may not be done yet for 2013. www.prairiestatecyclingseries.com/