Collegiate Season Wrap-Up

This weekend was my last race for the U of I. Long story short, it went okay, not great, but I still had a lot of fun.

The adventure started at about 4:35pm on Friday afternoon when I received a phone call from Miz Cole informing me that Mat Brown's car had died. Fear not: As any team of industrious engineers and LAS majors would, we packed 4 people, 4 bikes and all their stuff into Nick's 2-door Ford Focus. That's right, kids. Me, Nick, Mat Brown, and Logan in a 2-door Ford Focus. It shall forever be known as le Clown Car.

The next morning I lined up for a 30 mile road race. At the past few races, I've been chompin at the bit right up to the starting line, but Saturday morning was I definitely still feeling Thursday night's "festivities" (some time I'll have to blog about my Harry Potter challaces). I moved up the pack fairly quickly, and felt like crap the first lap. Then there was a three girl break on the last mega hill that I couldn't follow and it got away. I'm so lame. The beginning of lap 2 saw 2 girls from DePaul, me and Morgan. Morgan's knee was hurting her, so she dropped (feel better, Miz Moon!!!!). I tried to get DePaul together to work to catch the break, but they weren't working so I discarded them and chased for a lap and half by myself. I could see the break waaay up the road, but just didn't have the legs to drag my butt up there. I ended up 4th. Meh.

Today was a 45 minute crit around the WI state capital building. I really wanted to throw down a V today, but that didn't happen. The same beastly WI girl who won yesterday broke away today and I was left to working with UCVC and DePaul to try to catch her. It didn't work. We lapped the rest of the field, which was fun, but still no luck. I felt like I had no gas in the tank. I waited about 3 seconds too long into the final corner to throw down a sprint and Liz from UCVC beat me by about (half?) a bike length. (Props to her-- she's looking mighty strong!). 3rd place. Meh.


Major, major thanks to CErbach, Ameena, and Karl Erbach for treating us to an awesome pasta dinner and then showing us a good time at Essenhaus. And thanks to Nick for driving. And for having a Clown Car. And thanks to Logan and Mat for racing and having a good time, and taking some rad pictures. Riding bikes is so much fun :)

Maine Coon.

Time to do some catch up on some homework. And then it's off to a conference in Atlanta this week.