Silvers!

 

The picture says it all. I am now in the possession of two national master's silver medals! This is a great result by any measure, and I am happy to have done so well.

The kilo day ended up being enormously long. If you wanted real track time, you had to warm up at four in the afternoon and the program ran so long that I only got to race at midnight after seven hours of waiting with only rollers to keep warm on (I got slotted as the last rider of the night). In the end, Mike Beers (2002 elite kilo champion) bested me by .1 seconds. In the pursuit, the situation was reversed, I was the first rider out. This is the worst possible position as I had to guess what time to go for. I knocked a couple of seconds off winning times the day before and cruised in a PR by 7 seconds, but coming into the finish I know that this had been on the conservative side. Indeed, one of the later riders of the session managed to take a few seconds out of my time. Oh well, that's bike racing and I feel that I did the best I could do given the cards I was dealt.

We learnt a lot of lessons about logistics of racing and travelling by air on this trip (one of them being that it is really hard and exhausting). I have a newfound respect for pro's that have do this stuff all the time!

So this is the end of the 2007 track season, which proved to be a season of large improvements. Now it's time for vacation! Yay sweden!