First real hit out

Last night was probably one of the worst sleeps I’d had known to man kind. You know when you feel as though you’ve slept forever and it has only be a couple of hours? Yeh that happened to me, several times. Got woken up by a pretty violent storm and it was so hot that I could only lie on my bed without anything over me and I was still sweating… I eventually got up at about 1am and went downstairs because I herd the other girls get up. Turns out they had the same problem as me. Needless to say we were all pretty tired considering we had an early track session this morning and we had to leave here at 6:30am. The track session was pretty easy, did a warm up with the US crew and we then each did a standing half lap and a flying 200m. Track feels quite slow and has a massive headwind on the back straight.. Should make for some interesting racing tonight! We all cruised back home for lunch and Rick had a chat of what we’d be doing for the rest of the week. Here’s the plan:

- Tonight: track racing
- Tomorrow: 80-90km hills
- Thurs: morning = 40km recovery and in the afternoon I’ve got a crit
- Friday: morning = another 40km rec and UCI track racing at night (that should be pretty interesting. Apparently they get quite a lot of international riders…)
- Saturday = an easy 100km
- Sunday = the boys and I are hitting up a race in New York called Union Vale and the rest of the girls and Angus are doing a track omnium down here. Pretty excited for the road race, will be good to see what racing is like! Haven’t checked out the course yet but apparently all the info is on the net (our internet last about 2 seconds before disconnecting so haven’t been able to see it myself..)

Just got back from first real hit out of the trip and all in all I guess you could call it a success. After a pretty cruisy afternoon, we were all pretty keen to get stuck into some racing. We were racing in the women’s division which had several classy riders from numerous pro teams such as gina grain and a couple of girls from verducci breakaway etc. I think in total there was around 15-20 girls? Our first race was a 5km scratch. Racing was pretty hard and bit dodgy at times but I managed to get 2nd in that... Next was an elimination which I also picked up 2nd in and finally there was a points race which I got 4th in. Overall I got 2nd for the night behind Gina Grain from Canada. The girls worked really well as a team for each other, chasing down breaks and slowing them down when necessary! Highly rated it. The boys also did really well (see Rick’s update below)despite having forgotten half of their gear! (front wheels, pedals, shoes, helmets, tool kits etc..) haha but they sorted themselves out. We finished up at the track at around 10 o’clock and we were all shattered, people were falling asleep all over the place. All in all it was a really good day and a great way to start off racing for the team!

Hope this is a trend for the rest of our time here in the States!

Until next time,