Hi ABD!
Kristen and I had a ton of fun last week at the track in Northbrook. My fiancé Chris was nice enough to write up a report for us. Yep, I messed up the win-and-out (read below). More learning is done with every race!
Stacy
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Last Thursday was the first night of racing of the 2011 season at the Ed Rudolph velodrome in Northbrook IL. Officially the preious Thursday was opening night, but it unfortunately got rained out.
Kristen and Stacy were there in attendance to represent the ABD colors in the surprisingly large women's 1,2,3 field. And represent well is what they did!
In an impressive display of team work they worked together to ensure ABD took the top spot in ALL of the women's events of the night, and only missed taking both first and second place in the last race of the evening in an event known as the "Belgium win-and-out" due more to inexperience racing together than anything else. The Belgium win-and-out is an admittedly confusing race where 1st place is actually fifth place, and fifth place is actually 1st (more info at , http://www.northbrookvelodrome.org/information/glossary-of-racing-terms/ ) and in a moment of confusion between Kristen and Stacy, Francine Haas, who rides for Alberto's, as able to capitalize on the situation and take 2nd place, but Kristen secured 1st with Stacy close in reserve.
The best example of Kristen and Stacy's teamwork though was in the 5 mile scratch race. A scratch race is just a plain old race to the finish. They attacked and counter attacked several times to get Kristen away off the front. She strongly time trialed it in for the win while Stacy was able to rest in the pack so she could sprint for 2nd place. It was really fun to watch them work together so well! I think it's just a sign of the things the ABD women can accomplish when they work successfully as a team!
Since these gals LOVE racing their bikes, they both jumped in with some of the men's fields to get in more racing for the evening giving a strong showing in each. I think pretty much everyone who attended last night would admit that the performance of the evening was Stacy winning the cat 3, 15 lap tempo race! --Yes you read that right, she won against cat 3 men in arguably one of the hardest of track endurance events there is!
The tempo event is where the field sprints for points on EVERY lap, and the points are only awarded to the top two riders (2 points,and 1 point respectively). Anyone who has raced this event knows how unrelenting the pace is the entire time, and though I lost count of the point total, I can say Stacy it won it with a comfortable margin by both going off the front a couple of times and also out-sprinting the field! --Wow!
All in all it was a VERY successful night on the track for the ABD women's team with both girls winning two events each for a total of 4 races with ABD on the top step and two more second places--Not bad for an evening's racing!
Go ABD!
Chris
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