Practice Crit, or, Rookie mistakes I've made

Certain things happen when you race a crit on 4 hours of sleep. Like you don't pay attention to the lap counter and totally miss the final sprint. Sure, you are able to respond to the accelerations just fine because your legs are present, but you don't realize when it's 100% go time. Maybe your legs even feel awesome, in spite of the lack of sleep and the fact that you did a comp MTB race two days before, but when you're dumb enough to stay up til 4 in the morning you're not gonna get on the podium.

After the neutral lap, you are able to sit in any time the group speeds up, and you can even stay in the attack group when they go without getting your HR up too high. So once over half the field is blown off the back by the fast kids who are controlling the race, you just kind of hang out in the breakaway.

You notice the preem bell, and you notice what you think is a second preem bell. Because you forgot your watch and aren't paying attention to the lap counter (because you're doing this on 4 hours of sleep) you don't realize that on the 2nd to last corner you should have jumped harder. Or that maybe you should have sprinted instead of waiting for the inevitable regrouping of the Bs field that happens after preems.

So you get pinched off the back and end up in 6th or 7th because you made a rookie mistake and raced on 4 hours of sleep.