track racing

So yesterday was my first day racing on the track! I went down to the 7-11 velodrome in Colorado Springs with Nate Schwartz and Steve H. and did their thursday night race series. The way they do it is they have different catagories (A, B, and C, and a women's category) although women could race in any category they wanted to. Katie Compton was there racing in the A category and i wasn't watching too closely, but i'm pretty sure she did pretty well. Since it was my first time at the track, i headed out with Nate after registering to do a few warm up laps and get used to riding on a track with 30 degree banked corners (!). They don't seem that steep in the above picture, but riding around the track slowly, i was seriously worried about sliding down or clipping my pedal. After that, my first race was an 11 lap points race (just over 1k) with points given every 4 laps. Needless to say, my first track race ever didn't go so well with me finishing 3rd out of 4. Next race came after all of the other categories raced that same race was a 1 mile (just over 4 laps) scratch race, which meant that the first person over the line won the race. I got 3rd out of 4 in this race as well, but had a little better feel for riding on the track. The third race was a 5 mile scratch race and they combined the B's and C's categories so there were about 25 guys on the track racing. I placed 6th in this race, which was awesome and i got a much better feel for track racing. We had a pretty good pace line going for most of the laps of the race, which was really fun working with some other guys and really whipping around the track. I figure we probably were doing almost 45-50km/h for this race, and it was really tiring. During the A's race, it started raining a little bit so they called it off and we went home.

All in all, it was a super fun time and i'm going to try to go back next week if i can trade my shift at work for a morning shift. I'll post some pictures as soon as i get them from steve.