cause garrett asked for it-- states re-cap

so i am behind a little bit.

first things first

september 4 - 63cm
september 11- 62.75cm

okay, now that that is out of the way, hopefully michiko will continue to talk to me....

garret, i wish this was more interesting, but i can only exaggerate so much...it was a pretty uneventful weekend.

so track districts or track states (for the northern part of the state), or whatever they call it these days... was this weekend. it was pretty anti-climactic. even more anti-climactic than last year. thank goodness there is more racing for the year, because such minuscule field sizes would not be the way i would have wanted to end a year. beth welliver and i had one goal for the weekend: team beth domination. well, that didn't quite work out, but it was fun nonetheless to talk shit about....and, really, it is hard to use the 'domination' word when there are only a handful of you. so, here is the boring race rundown....and i worn you, it is boring!

500m- i have been jonesing to break 40"... but, things don't seem to be working out my way. i false started on my start. i first blame myself. i next blame peter bohl for blabbing up a storm during the countdown and trying to give me literally last second advice as casey is saying 5,4,3,2,1...so i pretty much left a full second early, as i am dumb and have difficultly listening to two people at once, apparently. oops. my second start was obviously bad. but it was extra bad. kind of frustrating for me, cause i have been working on the starts a bunch and i think they have gotten better, but i have yet to show that during an actual race. anyway, i guess i can't complain too much, cause i did have a personal best, 40.2, but i know i should have been faster than that.

keirin- we had 6 for this race, so that was exciting. i asked larry nolan to hold me, and hoped some of his mojo would rub off on me. which it did. i took the moto, it pulled off and i pretty much just kept pace on the back stretch, front stretch, turn 1&2--and made sure no one came over. then jumped hard out of the turn to win.

team sprint- so i was looking forward to this event the most of all! annabell is on fire right now, and i am feeling really good, and i knew that we could pull out a sweet, sweet time-- maybe breaking 52". my biggest concern, obviously, was the start. she was going first-- last time she gapped me a bit, so i was hoping to stay on her wheel off the line. well, i had probably one of my best starts to date and got on her wheel! i was so stoked cause i knew that she would bring me up to a bitchin' speed and i could hold it for a lap longer. then, suckyness occurred. coming out of turn four we both heard this loud NOISE. it kinda sounded like i hit her front wheel or something, but it was my back wheel and it skipped up track. that kind of through me off balance and i didn't know what to do or what happened..... did my tire pop? did my wheel slip? was i going to go down if i kept pedaling? should i keep sprinting? these were all thought i had just as annabelle was pulling off--and i definitely eased up and wasn't going as fast as i could at this point...but finished the race, but a full second slower than our time last time. i was pretty bummed. gio saw what happened, and said that i was super stiff in my upper body, and i was riding in the rut of the pavement and hit it at the right time to skip up. kind of a bummer, because we don't get a lot of opportunities to do team sprints...but, lesson learned not to ride in the gutter. i feel/felt pretty bad, cause annabel came that whole day just to do the team sprint with me, and then i buffed it cause of something stupid.

sunday was the sprints & scratch race. it was a pretty crappy day for me..

my 200 sucked balls. it was cold, but i was so slow it wasn't even humorous. beth welliver and i were the only people entering the tournement. jill wasn't feeling well, so she didn't do the match sprints. we learned some good things, though, and jill was awesome and stuck around and gave us pointers after each of our rides. it was so so nice! let me just say how freakin' fast of a sprinter beth welliver is! she is going to be real nasty next year!

scratch race was probably even worse for me. i felt crappy and in a bad mood and i rode like it. i should have gotten lapped a couple times, cause it was fast. but i shouldn't have gotten lapped 12 times. well, maybe 12 is a bit of an exageration, but whatever...i should have ridden much better than i did.

so, that was my long ass weekend at the track, with painfully small field sizes--but i was pretty much expecting that... thanks to all the women who did come out-- both this weekend & all the women who came out to the track this year in general. it was really fun having women's fields, and i hope that next year we can just get some of those field sizes for elite qualifiers & states.