Preparing for the Idaho State Criterium Championships

Gatlin & I are preparing to race in a criterium this weekend. Pretty scary - close quarters racing for the first time for me. Not something I'm comfortable with at all, but the field is gonna be ridiculously small and I'll be on the course with only a few others. The bad news is that we'll all be equally underexperienced so staying out of each others' way might be a challenge (until Gat & I put the hammer down and leave all the chumps behind for good).

Gat & I spent Tuesday night practicing. There's your silver lining to the "economic downturn" and "housing crisis." Crits are run on short loops - kinda like the NASCAR or Formula 1 of bike racing. Perfect for practice crits are abandoned subdivisions where they paved all the roads then realized they couldn't sell any houses so didn't build any. And places like that are a dime a dozen around here nowadays. Sweet. No houses = no one entering/exiting the sub = no traffic + ease in seeing around corners just in case; and new construction = new pavement = smooth riding.

So Gat & I raced three short crit races, three laps apiece on a 0.6-mile loop. I won two and he won the last one - I was completely out of gas by that point and Gatlin swept right past me before the last turn. I knew he was gonna make his move there, but I hadn't even the energy to get off my saddle much less to answer his charge. We both maxed out above 31 MPH on level ground. It was unbelievably fun. We almost surely won't hit 31 in the race on Sunday (it'll be longer - ~20 minutes, so we'll hafta conserve more energy), but it should be just as fun. Gatlin's got an edge on me because he ran track in high school so he's more experienced in the whole strategizing thing, which is a giant part of crits (though I did learn a bit from him).

So I'm quite jazzed. I've been grinning like a chimpanzee thinking about it ever since we decided to do it.