I think you explain it well. Good discussion. I always get a smile on my face when I think of the term “Mexican echelon”; do you know what that is? If you don’t, that is when a second group of rider forms directly behind the first one looking for an opportunity to break in to the first one. Kind of like sloppy seconds. I ended up in a Mexican echelon situation one time when a 16-year old Tyler and I were on the last race of a stage race called the Tumbleweed Stage Race in Richland. I was doing Masters, leading the GC, when the road race course turned into a powerful tail-cross wind. John Weyrich was sitting in 2nd or 3rd place on GC and had a few team mates from Montana with him. He had gone to the front and his team mates hammered at 36mph with him. Tyler and I were “cherry-picking” at the mid-back of the pack when this happened. I recall that all of a sudden, we started going just as hard as we could but still I thought “no problem…” But Tyler was the last one into the echelon, next to the gutter, and I was left behind to fry…and that was the end of my race…I wasn’t smiling at the time!