This was probably one of the most interesting Wednesday-night crits we've had in a long time. These races are training races, and it's fun to have different plans and see what plays out. We had a couple different plans tonight and we'd had a couple conversations with riders from the other teams, so we kind of had an idea how it was going to play out. But there were a few wild card riders tonight, and that made most of the race an unknown because we were never sure what they might do.
Valerie, Cali, and I were the three Team Belladium representatives, and we were up against Sandra and Kathy of SVMIC; Amanda, Marsha, Emily, and Chrysa of Cumberland Transit; Shannon and Paula of Team Vantaggio; and 2 unattached riders. The race started calm enough with only a few surges (kind of relaxed attacks), and about 10 minutes in Val and Kathy attacked a couple times. They got away once, but Val was caught in no-man's land and eventually came back to the pack. Kathy stayed out for about 5 laps while CT and Vantaggio chased her down.
Cali and I had to work really hard to stay patient and do no work. It wasn't too bad for 2 or 3 laps, when Valerie was up with Kathy, but when she came back to our group we no longer had a teammate up the road and had no excuse to not work except that we didn't need to. So we waited until 2 laps to go to move, and Cali led for at least a lap before I came around her to take the final 2 corners and the win. Definitely couldn't have done it without those two lovely ladies. And I'm sure we made quite a scene for the spectators who know what normally happens during our races, because this was pretty different—different attackers, different chasers, different riders. But it was definitely one of the most fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment