Category: B

Another Wednesday, another evening at the track.

As it is the District Championships at the weekend, I took the opportunity of digging out the aero bars and tweaking them for a better fit. In the warm-up, I felt better than I did last week which is encouraging.

To the racing. As the Madison Championship is on Friday, the plan was for the A's to largely do Madison-based events so the teams could work on their exchanges. However, not many A's wanted to do the Madison events, so the evening defaulted to the standard 3-group/4-event format.

First up for us was a 10-lap scratch race where I finished in the pack. The Madison folk (2 pairs) had a Madison pursuit, a team pursuit containing Madison exchanges. Unfortunately, there was a crash in this event and that was the Madison content for the evening. We were worried for a while by Gary Yakota who went down quite hard, but he was just stunned, and to our surprise was up and walking within 5 minutes of the crash. Phew...

Our next event was a points race with unknown locations of the sprints. I managed to get into a good position on the last sprint and win the bunch sprint behind a lone escapee for second, earning me 3rd in the race. Then we had a win and out, where I managed to place third again, sprinting past two riders, including one in the last 10 metres. He was a tad peeved! Finally, we had a miss and out, and I managed to get myself eliminated first time round as I wasn't ready for the initial acceleration and ended up at the back. Ooops.

Still, I was feeling better than last week, so the fitness is moving in the right direction.

Back to top