Bucknell race weekend!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3LbjKQTVsA

It's been awhile since I've posted but I've been so busy! Good busy ... with lots of good stuff to do.

So, last weekend was my first REAL collegiate cycling race in 2 years!! I did race at Philly over spring break but I was still dying of bronchitis during that race so I'm not counting that one. Here's a recap:

Road Race: 45 miles, 2hour 15minutes, average heart rate = 173 ... yeah... my heart rate was at 87% of its maximum for over 2 hours ... indeed it was a hard race.

We had five laps of a rolling course with 2 moderate short climbs. At the end of the 2nd lap Princeton (Rachel) got off the front, I caught up to her, and we worked together for about 10 minutes until UNH (Susannah) and Lehigh (Andrea) caught up with us. We had a good group of 4 hard workers and we were making more and more time on the pack. At the end of the 3rd lap, 4 other girls caugh up with us ... including my teammate Erica Allar! (yay!) :) They were DRILLING it!!! 8 women pacelining like we were in a national team time trial ... hence my incredibly high heart rate. In the middle of the last lap, Erica and Kim Geist (LaSalle) broke away and it was only me, Susannah, and Cailtin (MIT) left. We worked together for the rest of the lap and then got stretched out toward the end... and I ended up 4th!! It was a really exciting and exhausting race to be in, but it gave me my itching to race again.

Criterium:
This course was crazy!!! 0.87 mile loop with 8 turns each lap ... 50 minutes ... lots of sprinting and attacking!

At the beginning of the race I led the pack at a good pace because I wanted to get a good feel for all the corners. By the end of the 1st lap, though, I had a little gap on the field. Williams (Katie) caught up to me and we worked hard together for 5 laps ... she is QUITE the time trialist. With 15 laps to go 4 other girls ... including Erica again!! ... caught up to us and all of us pacelined it for the rest of the race. The motorcycle lead vehicle basically knocked Susannah off her bike once but she hopped right back into the race. Williams kept attacking and I would chase her down because I knew Erica has a kickass sprint and she needed to be up there for the final sprint. I got a lot of prime (intermediate sprints throughout the race) points which helped my race standings a bit... It's always nice to get some of those, especially because I never consider myself much of a sprinter. The last final stretch of the race was about 3 blocks and I started an attack early to the line to throw people off and let Erica take the sprint ... and ... it worked!!! Erica won and I got 4th again... yay! It was such a FUN race to compete in and it was awesome to have a teammate up there with me too.

And as usual, we are some of the silliest post-race cyclists ... so here's me and Erica's race report about the crit... well, actually it's up at the top of the post.