Tonight was probably the coolest night of racing I've had so far this year. The team format was cool, and the races were great (except that 80-lap thing). It was basically a sprinter's omnium, which is always appreciated.
I started out the night with an attempt to break the district record in the flying 200, and fell short by 0.195 seconds. So close, yet still so very far away. I crushed my max speed PR on the track, but the headwind on the backstretch took too much out of me. In retrospect, it wasn't a good night to attempt the record (dry, cool, and windy), but it was something I had to do. I did set a new PR of 11.41, so it wasn't totally in vain.
I absolutely buried myself in the record attempt, and we lined up to do the team 200m TT less than 5 minutes later. I generally need about 20 minutes to recover from a flying 200. Ted and I set the fastest time of the day with an 11.5, and I promptly stumbled off the track to vomit. Lactic acid is a bitch.
We skipped the 20-lap tempo race because I was physically unable to mount my bicycle and bring it over to the track. Then I puked again. By this point, I was feeling much better!
Next up was the team 1000m TT. Since neither Ted nor I had done a kilo before, I was a little concerned with how we would do. We kept it at about 95% on the first 2 laps, then just gave it everything we had, and ended up with the fastest time - for about 2 minutes, when Tainter and Ferris smoked us by 2 full seconds. Ouch.
The last race of the night was a 360. Basically, it's a 1.5-lap race from a standing start. We had 10 teams, so it really was kind of a cluster-fuck to get everyone lined up. Since Ferris and Tainter had the best kilo time, they "won" the 10th position in the 360. Congrats, guys! Anyway...
I knew with that many riders it would be imperative to get a good start. I came out of the hole in 1st with Ferris on my wheel. We had a decent gap on the rest of the field, and I knew Ferris wouldn't want to come around me until the backstretch, so I slowed the pace a bit to conserve energy, then accellerated a couple different times. He almost came around me at the line, but I was able to hold him off. Barely.
Franz also won his heat, overcoming a big gap that Tainter put into the field at the start.
With that, we called it a day. According to various reports, we either got 1st or 2nd in the omnium, which is pretty good considering that there were a lot of really strong teams out there!
This was a really fun event, and I hope Smithers puts it on again next year.
2 comments:
Thanks Smithers for putting this race together. If you decide to do this race series next year any possibility to do it during the week? Weekends are tough to make for some of us.
When planning events you have to look at time available and look at the race schedule for road/track to try and maximize rider turnout. If you're going to promote a track event, you basically have wedesdays, fridays, saturdays and sundays available. Mondays is class night, tuesdays are out due to structure training, plus during most of the season there are road crits on tuesday nights. On Wednesdays blackdog is going on every other week, and wednesdays is kind of a rest day between tuesday training and thursday night racing. So then you're left with Friday, Saturday or Sunday night.
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