2004-07-19 - Alpenrose Velodrome Challenge Wow, what a weekend.. Mike and Candi Murray have got to be some of the most dedicated race officials / promoters any where, They camped out at the track from some time Friday until late on Sunday and to my knowledge did not leave once, and they even got awaken from a nice nights sleep by the un-official naked kilo (which I was not invited to, and did not even know happened at non-collegiate events) and they where happy to joke about it for the rest of the weekend. Any way racing went well other then the fact I was a total idiot on Friday.. I fell down while getting ready to start my kilo, road a horribly slow kilo, then jumped right into a qualifier points race that I unknowingly did not need to race due to finishing top ten in several events in Victoria. Then on Saturday was sprints and olympic sprints.. sprints went well, I finished 7th ahead of a couple guys who beat me pretty bad the week before in Victoria. Then for the olympic sprint, originally it was supposed to me Stephen McLaughry, Mark Godfrey and myself, but Mark had a healthy crash on the previous tuesday and was not yet ready to race, then Stephen Alpfred walks up and asks Stephen if he had a team, and of course we jumped at the chance to race with him. So start time comes and my 100% + effort start is not even close to enough to keep up with my boy Stephen McLaughry monster start, and I broke my axle on my Zipp disk (again).. as the closer I ended up with only about a half a lap of draft and we still got 3rd place just under a second slower then 2nd and a little over two seconds slower then 1st.. the moral(s) of the story, when doing olympic sprints it's a real good idea to practice together at least once.. I need to work on my starts a lot before I try and match either of the Stephens starts.. And last but not least, when you get mentioned in velonews for the first time try really hard to not have it about a screw up.. oops. Next day life goes on, the keirin was fast, I missed qualifying again, but got to watch some good racing. In the end no one was even close to the speed of Stephen Alfred Later in the evening it was points race time.. 100 laps or so of fun, with the likes of Mike Creed, Joey D'Antoni, Kenny Williams, Jame Carney, and Olympics bound guys from the Uruguay National Team it turned out to be much to fast of a race for about half the field with many of us dropping out totally dazed and confused quite early on in the race. Next week Marymoor

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