2004-07-27 - AVC Racing at Marymoor Week number three of AVC racing in a row, this time only two days of racing (even though there was an unconnected day of racing at the track on friday) and on a much much bigger, flatter track. We started out with flying 200's where my new friends Keith Bruneau and David McElhaw threw down mid 11's, which is pretty damn fast time for that track, the rest of us fumbled around in the 12's. Even though I qualified 5th fastest I just couldn't get things to click on the track like they normally do and lost two straight rounds of sprints and thus finished out of the placings, then Stephen McLaughry went up against Scott Laliberte, coming into turn three they where bumping and playing for position when there was a loud pop and scott folded down under Stephen who then went flying flipped over and landed on his head. Scott's tire appeared to have blown out on the side wall and then his carbon fiber tri spoke wheel broke causing him to slide down track into the sprinters lane just in front of Stephen. Scott got banged up pretty bad and broke his collar bone and with Canadian nationals in two weeks that really sucks, as he's a pretty nice guy and a pretty fast guy who was really looking forward to that race. My boy stephen on the other hand, broke his helmet, bent his front wheel (which had scotts tyre glue smeared on it in the crash), had a very small tear on his skin suit, and bumped his elbow, the guy knows how to crash. Later Stephens elbow started to really bother him and became the big secret of the day as he was still in contention for the sprints, but it proved to be too painful to ignore and still sprint normally. The next day was Keirin and the most un-organized moment of the weekend, they posted three totally different lists for the heats, so no one really knew who they where racing in the qualifiers until they lined up. they ended up with only two heats with three advancing, and I totally blew it, I went too early and didn't have enough at the line where I really should have had 3rd easy if I road smarter.. oops, the reps where 15-20 minutes later and I was still hurting from the first round and half the guys in the rep had been in the first heat and got quite a bit more time to rest. Two would advance, to instead of trying to be a tough guy and race aggressively I just chose the guy I thought would win and just road his wheel to finish 2nd with out really working too hard. In the finial, things got damn fast, no one who was trying to race from the back could really come around as we where stacked up 5 wide in turn 3 with Matt Chater and Keith Bruneau coming out ahead of the rest after the oh so long straight away. Then the points race, which though much slower then the previous weeks points race still managed to put me into a state of zombie racer where all I could do was hang on to my group which was 1/2 a lap behind the lead for almost half the race, it was crazy, somewhere between 10 and 20 laps to go I could no longer make out who was who in the race and could just pedal, in the end I had 0 points but still finished 10th due to the fact that many who had points did not finish and those who did finish either had a lot of points or no points. Any way it's been a great three weeks, I've met a lot of very very cool people who hopefully I'll get to race / train / hang out with in the future. I think of how much faster I need to get to be able to win at this level, but then I think that just last year I was just moving up to cat 3 and getting my butt kicked just about as bad. Those that know me, know that I'm stubborn and hard working, so give me a couple years.

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