Track Nationals and Beyond

The trip to LA for nationals super fun as is always is. The flight down was nice because Erin and Al were both on my flight. We were met at the airport by our always amazing hosts, Jack and Megan and the eating of good vegan food commenced almost immediately. The second night in town, Jack organized an eating competition between him and me at Doomie's Home Cookin'. First to quit without releiving themselves would be the winner. Missing from the photos is the opening round which was 2lbs of salad followed by hot fires w/ ranch, okra, chimichangas, deep fried oreos, fresh baked cookie ala mode, and I finally threw in the towel 2/3 of the way through the chili dog with deep fried hotdog and tempeh bacon and resigned. I didn't want to risk throwing up and loosing all of the valuable nutrition that I would need for the week.



Over all I was a little disappointed with my results at nationals. The schedule was terrible so I had to choose between the omnium and the scratch race. Since the omnium cost about a million dollars i choose the scratch race. I felt really good in the final 10 laps and was hanging midpack keeping an eye on things. I must have been in one hell of a "zone" or something becuase when i thought there were about 6 laps left i looked at the lap board and it said 3. At the moment things got crazy and i was lucky to close as much ground as i did to manage 5th. I've never managed to lose track of laps that bad before.

Team pursuit would have gone a lot better if we had done any race paced practice before hand. All things considered the squad of Al Urbanski, Jake Hanson, Austin Carroll and myself did pretty well. We had a plan going into the ride with how many and how long of pulls people would take. It when a little haywire but worked out pretty good and we qualified 3rd to make the bronze medal ride off. We stuck with the same pull structure that we did in the qualifying ride and went 3 seconds faster and secured 3rd. We were on the fastest pace at 1k and were were on a better place than the team that ended up 2nd. Too bad we didn't get to do a ride like that in qualifying or we could been at least 2nd.


Points race was a cluster as usual and I got caught behind the wrong people at the wrong time and gapped off for a good amount to the end of the race. I had enough points from the first half to get 6th. There was also some drama with whether some people had gotten a lap or not. It didn't seem like it to me but what is bike racing without a little drama.

The madison was hard, as it usually is. Some of the riding was dirty and the racing negative. But one thing is for sure, Jame and Ian killed it. Dan and I got gapped off and a bad time and I had to chase back, which pretty much fried me after having to sprint as well. We managed 5th place and i got to wear this itty bitty short short skin suit.

I took two weeks off after nationals and I'm not totally sure when racing is going to start again. It will be nice to get some good strength training and core work in, since I didn't get to last winter due to a back injury. There are some definite changes on the horizon so stay tuned.