Season wrap-up

I'm sitting in the San Francisco airport right now, waiting for a flight to Atlanta, GA and then a flight from there to Manchester, England for the 2011 masters track cycling world championships.  Today marks the start of another multinational off-season adventure.

I made the podium in the team sprint at Colorado state championships over Labor Day weekend.

This past weekend I wrapped up my 2011 racing season with some competition at the US elite track nationals in Los Angeles, CA.  All in all, this was a highly successful season, with three events in the past month that I want to go into a little more detail about.

The first weekend in September was the Colorado state championships at the track in Colorado Springs.  I rode every event (individual pursuit, sprints, points race, scratch race, kilo, team pursuit, keirin, Madison, and team sprint) this year, and while I missed out on claiming any state championships, I made the podium in 6 of the 9, an encouraging result for an omnium rider.

The second weekend in September, there was an event that I was not a direct participant in, but that I watched with keen interest.  It was the paralympic road racing world championships in Roskilde, Denmark.  A racer who I have been piloting on training rides this year was competing, took 5th in the time trial, and then went on to win the road race.  Having been part of this rider's training over the course of the year was a huge boost to my morale toward the end of a long season.

Finally, this past weekend was the elite track nationals at the Home Depot Center velodrome in Los Angeles, CA.  I had a fairly full schedule with the international omnium event on Wednesday and Thursday, scratch race on Thursday, team pursuit on Friday, and points race on Saturday.  The omnium was my real focus for the season.  Things went more or less according to plan on Wednesday, but then on Thursday I exceeded expectations by riding a 20-second PR in the 4km pursuit, placing me 3rd among the omnium riders and 4th (had I paid my $60 and signed up) for the stand-alone pursuit.  By the end of the night on Thursday, I was sitting in 8th place in the omnium, a very satisfying improvement from my 17th place finish last year.

Also, I qualified for the final in the scratch race, my first scratch race final at an elite nationals.  That was an exciting improvement over the previous years' efforts at nationals.  Then on Saturday we had the points race, where I qualified for the final fairly comfortably, and then threw down at the end of the 40-km evening ride and captured points at the 10-to-go and finishing lap points sprints.  That was one of the hardest efforts I've made in a track race, but it felt really good to go out there and leave everything I had on the track.

Here is a video showing some of the highlights from the points race.  In the closing laps, I'm the rider at the bottom of the track, being chased by a group of three riders.  Even knowing how that last lap turned out, it was kind of a nail-biter when I saw this video on Monday night.

Stay tuned for more updates from the UK and Europe.  I'm on my way!