Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Hellyer Wednesday Night, June 3, 2010

The track is like driving in jammed pack traffic except instead of poking along you're all putting the gas pedal to the floor and moving at 80 miles per hour and, by the way, you don't have brakes. Yet somehow it works. You'd expect all kinds of 30 mph carnage but it rarely happens. But that doesn't mean there aren't those "oh shit!" moments. Tonight had more of those than I'm comfortable with. On top of that the Wednesday night races cram four races in and the actual track time suffers.

Kieren: Blah. Fifth in my heat. Realization that the legs are NOT recovered from the race weekend. Congrats, welcome to the next 45 minutes of doing nothing but holding starters.

Scratch race: 12 laps. It was a wierd pace. Semi fast but balled up. With 4 laps to go I finally found my way up to the front. I was second wheel with 2.5 to go and actually feeling good. But the guy ahead faded HARD at the beginning of the last lap and with all the passing over the top I got boxed in. Boy that was frustrating but what was worse was hearing a big crash behind me on the last lap. Not cool. No one was hurt badly, just a bunch of road rash and some sore butts and shoulders tomorrow. Saw more than a few trashed wheels.

Miss-n-out: First guy pulled and it was intentional. I just wasn't comfortable with four or five of the guys in the pack especially with the nerves of the crash still fresh.

Points: 15 laps, sprint every 5. Lots of really sketchy riding again. My legs didn't have any oomph until 4 laps to go when they suddenly woke up. In a totally dejavu moment, I moved up into a sweet position for the sprint and the guy ahead (flippin' Fergus, the one time of the night he doesn't rise to the challenge of a sprint, I'm on him like glue, geesh!) faded and I got boxed in.

So, the usual fun of camaraderie and racing induced adreneline was all there but the length of the races on the Tuesday Nights is better. Too bad those are done for the year until September.

1 comment:

The Bearded Wonder said...

The blech feeling you express is what I've been feeling all year long at the track. I haven't done any Tuesday nights this year, so I can not vouch for them. The GRFS series, though, has the same format as the Wed. night series. Adding the Keirin, though fun has done 2 things. 1. Attract the sprinters (good). 2. Make the other 3 races so short that the endurance riders cannot get a good length workout, and the sprinters dominate.