Coyote Creek Crit

By Brianne Burgess
Date: July 8, 2006
Category: Women 1/2/3
Teammates: Flavia -- what a great suprise!!!
Place: 3rd (me) and 4th (Flavia)
Winner: Mary-Ellen Ash (Velo Girls)

The course is a 1.8 mile loop with a nice gradual 100 ft climb. It was a suprisingly early race start of 9:15am, but we were quite thankful, with the thermometer reading 85 degrees at 9am.

As I was putting my bike on my trainer I was excited to see Flavia approach me. I moved over to the shade with her and Lula (Velo Bella) and had a nice warm up. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel considering I had been sick for the past week and a half, with inconsistent riding and workouts, but I wasn't too nervous because I didn't think we were going to have a good turnout. Luckily, I was wrong. Proman and Velo Girls both had full teams, Los Gatos had Yukie and Jennifer Van Muckey, and there were and a bunch of individual riders.

Jennifer and I led the first lap. Nothing too exciting took place the next couple of laps. The race was a nice pace--not too slow, but not too fast. Proman made a couple of attacks. Flavia and I did a great job of covering them all. The field did a great job of reeling any attempts back. I was disappointed that 2 of the 4 breaks I was in were unorganized, which was unfortunate because Emily and Shelley had the power to stay away.

Well, it came down to the last lap and a half. I made a small attempt to lead out the last lap with a pathetic attack off the front hoping that I would spark a fast last lap. Boy, was I wrong. We were bunched going into the second to last corner before the uphill sweep. I was watching Shelley and Proman hoping that Flavia and I could work off their lead out. Flavia was on Shelley's wheel. Lori and Nicola were leading out Emily. I was sitting 10th right in the middle of the two leadouts, trying to figure out who I wanted to use. It seemed that everyone was watching each other and kinda of sat up, except for a Mary-Ellen (Velo Girls) and Emily, who went early. I jumped in the wind, uphill, alone and gunned it with all I had and nearly caught the Velo Girl and Emily, who took 1st and 2nd respectively. Flavia jumped after she saw me going and took 4th.

We were happy to have such a good showing against the larger teams.