Fifty Plus (50+) - Our 1st Match Sprint Tournament

Yesterday, Hermes and I did our first match sprint tournament at the Hellyer Velodrome in San Jose, CA. We figured we should put the skills that we learned at the Kenny Williams track camp a couple weeks ago to the test! There were 23 racers, including 3 women (counting me) and 2 juniors. We started out by each of us doing a flying 200 meter time trial. Based on our 200 meter times, we were placed into 4 groups of 6. Some of these guys were really fast!! The fastest 200 m time was 11.26 seconds – smokin’! Hermes was with the guys in the 3rd group and I was in the 4th group with the other women and the juniors. Then we did several match sprints; some were "two-up" (two sprinters); some "three-up" (three sprinters). We start at the rail, roll off and then do two laps. The first lap is generally cat-and-mouse, each person watching the other to see who is going to make the first move. Once that happens it is a sprint to the finish. It was fun racing with my Webcor team mate because we are both competitive and are so evenly matched in the sprint events. I won one of the three match sprints and my team mate took the other two. The match sprint is an event at the state and national championships, so this was a rare opportunity to practice (most of the seasonal racing at the track is mass start events). But most importantly, it was a blast! The weather was gorgeous - just like summer - must have been close to eighty degrees 'tho we had some wind to contend with. My M.O. - trying something new and challenging keeps you young.

Here are some photos.

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Ladies starting at the rail: Roaring Mouse, Webcor teammate, Velodiva

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Sprint to victory (photo courtesy of Jan Snyder, JP Images)

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Velodiva on the track - the photographer embedded that title - not me!!! (photo courtesy of Jan Snyder, JO Images)

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Hermes at the rail in #1 position

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Hermes leading out

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Hermes at the track

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Hermes sprinting

Velodiva with her team mate who raced with her on the Webcor Team Time Trial at Altamount Saturday. These women will rip your legs off – very scary.
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Here is my bike as ridden. I borrowed a set of HED 3c. They worked really well but were a little erratic a couple of times in wind gusts. I used a 49/16 for warmup and raced in a 49/15. I was thinking about gearing up a bit but a friend, who has been advising me at the track, suggested that I stick with lower gear. He agreed that I would be faster in a bigger gear but taking the longer view, it would be better to work on increasing my cadence in a competitive format and later increase gear inches. And of course, there is always the concern about injury due to using big gears at max effort. He was right about one thing. I was spinning my brains out keeping up with the competition.
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