Regionals Recap #1

Its hard living in Chicago when you really love riding your bike over hills.  This weekend, Carly and I escaped the flatness and headed to WI for some hilly fun with the UCVC crew.  

The women's A road race was 5 loops around a hilly 10-mile circuit with a steep uphill finish.  The pack stayed together for the first loop and despite this being Carly's 2nd A's race, she showed her racing smarts by positioning herself right near the front of the pack (but not in the wind!).  On the second lap, we approached a series of hills on the backstretch and Carly and I were leading the pack.  I was eager to hammer on the hills and pushed hard up them.  I managed to get a gap on the field and a Michigan rider bridged with and IU rider close behind.  We quickly started to work together and continued to open our gap, while Carly remained strong in the main pack.  Soon the IU rider slowed her pace and the Michigan rider and I were left to finish 3 more laps on our own.  We worked well together for most of the three laps, pushing hard up the hills and keeping a good pace on the flats.  With a couple miles to go, we eased up a bit and rode side by side knowing that the race would come down to an uphill sprint.  Michigan rider turned to me and said "you are going to take the sprint"... I wasn't sure if she was really feeling tired or if this was some sort of secret psychological tactic :)  Either way, I was ready for an all-out uphill sprint.  The finish came and it was clear that my cheering section was vastly superior to the Michigan crew - this gave me enough of a burst to get a UCVC win - thanks guys!  

Shortly after, Carly "Seahorse" Schuster arrived with a shredded main pack.  She didn't have the turbo boost that she hoped for on the last uphill.  But she finished her 2nd A's race and longest race ever in the top half of the field!  

The next day our crew headed out early for a team time trial on some more hills (yay!).  Carly and I were the last of the UCVC to set out on the 10 mile out and back (and out and back) course.  We set a good pace and worked together really well.  It was fun to see our guys D-team and women's B-team crushing it on the course as we crossed paths with them.  Carly and I managed to pass the 2-person team ahead of us, but just got caught by the strong 4-woman IU crew right before the finish line and couldn't quite beat the time of our guys (next time!!).

The crit was later in the day on a course that circled the capital building in downtown Madison.  It would have been a super fun course if we didn't have a maze of potholes to navigate around.  Our race started off pretty fast and furious.  Unfortunately a cramp took Carly out early (better than getting taken out by a pothole!!).  But she wasn't out of the race - she joined the superior UCVC cheering section on the backside of the course.  I worked a lot at the front of the race and was pretty successful on the prime laps - ended up taking 3rd in the sprint.  All in all, a good day. 

We had a lot of memorable performances this weekend: from Paige carrying on Carly's tradition of setting her own course at the regionals road race, Zac's styling argyle socks, Araba becoming a Crit-racing machine, Aspen's epic road race, Jesse crushing the prime sprint (and Bernard crushing the laps right before the primes), Ari's spectacular finish... and much much more... hopefully their stories are to come!