Lux et Velocitas - Recap

I've spent a significant portion of the morning reading through the ECCC blogosphere, which perhaps shows my dedication to cycling, or alternatively shows my lack of dedication to academics. However, because of my blog-stalking, I came to realize that my own team is severely underrepresented in said blogosphere. There is no reason that Columbia shouldn't have its own blog centered around our well-rounded athletes (see our photo of the week competition for definition of "well rounded").

I am also jealous of the other well-written blogs out there. Mount Holyoke has a tiny team with some big attitude.

While I am ready to get our version of the story told, I also realize that I have a less-than-heroic weekend to relay. My racing this weekend can mostly be summed up with this photo:


About 5 laps into the Women's B race there was flailing and skidding and bikes strewn everywhere. No one is really sure what happened (something to do with our field being afraid of the potholes on the inside of turn 5 and needing to jet from the middle to the outside line without notice), but what I do know is that I went completely over the handlebars, and either Becca's or Anne's bike left a nice dent in my helmet. I like to think that my previous roller skating career was just practice for the crashing that I'll be doing as a bike racer.

The upside of this incident was that I got this really cool photo of it before the photographer had to take off and do his ER doctor thing with the people that went down harder than I did. Also, if you notice, going head over heels meant that I skidded on my shoulder/arm warmers rather than on my legs, meaning my decision to wear embrocation as opposed to leg warmers did not result in a bloodbath of legs meeting pavement. Not that the pavement could have penetrated my Vaseline-layer of steel.

Though I wasn't hurt, I was shaking rather violently. I have never been able to make a decent decision while running on adrenaline, so I chose to take a DNF rather than a free lap. Of course, as the field passed me, I calmed down enough to be ready to jump back in the race. About 15 seconds too late. So I had to take my anger and disappointment out on the roads of New Haven and the rollers, instead.

This comes after a day of suffering through the rain on Saturday. The ITT wasn't too bad (meaning I was only a minute and a half behind the leader, rather than the embarrassing 4 minutes from Army), but the circuit race was a bit of a disaster. As you can see from the above picture, riding on a flat road on a clear day is dangerous enough in the WoB's, so I had no desire to fight the pack for 45 minutes when soaking wet and unable to see more than 5 feet in front of me. So I made the decision to hang at the front, even though I took the risk of screwing myself at the end.

The first decent was awesome, as I decided to do something unheard of in the WoB's -- pedal downhill. I gapped the field by making about a 5% effort. Maybe this says as much about my ass as it does about my pedal power, but whatevs. Anyway, I did lots of controlling the field for the first 3 1/2 laps, but by the time we hit the last climb I was beat. One of the Yale girls launched an attack right before we got there, I put out way too much energy, gassed myself, and wheezed my way up East Rock for a wonderfully unsatisfactory 27th(ish) place finish. Bitches.

In other news, the team's got nothing to complain about. Mostly because Maggie is awesome, but also because of great crit finishes from Carrie (with yet another spectacular lead out from Nicole) and Dave, who came out of nowhere to sqash the D Uncertainty Principle.

And lets not forget what we learned this week:

• Burned down diners are not out of the question when it comes to picking a restaurant
• If you want to make new friends, hide candy around your van
• Always preview the course
• Be nice to the people at the front desk in your hotel. Always.
• When someone cuts you off, throw a banana at them
• When someone throws a banana at you, get out the jar of JIF.