Weekend of March 1-2

[Andrea]

Glad to hear everyone had good weekends!

That crit situation is weird- I've been in crits where they combine us with the older masters men. If they start us all together, they'll tell us that we can work together during the race and will just be placed separately. Occasionally, they'll do something like what you experienced and start one field a minute ahead. In that case, they'll say we can't work together, and that we are responsible for neutralizing ourselves if one group is trying to overtake another. It gets hectic. I wish we could all just race in our respective groups by ourselves!

[Eden]

I guess we are fortunate to always have fields that are large enough to merit their own races... We do usually have a combined women's 1,2,3 and they do not score separately in Washington when this is true. In Oregon there are sometimes completely combined races where the 1,2's are scored separately from the 3,4's - but ORBA has purchased some of those very fancy finish line cameras (the same kind they use in the TDF that sometimes when there is a close finish they will show the camera image) so they can place every rider very accurately.

This is our first year with any separate 3's races and they are trying out putting the 1,2 women in with the master's A/B men and scoring them separately. I guess they figured that it would break out naturally, but the slower men ended up with the women and everytime one of the women would attack, one of the guys would pull it back (and drag the pack along too...), until one of the more senior women gave them all a dressing down that their race was reallly over and that they needed to let the women have their race.

We are really hoping that having some 3's races will enable more women to become 2's, growing the 1,2 field enough to justify always having our own fields, the same as the men. The only problem then becomes that there starts to not be enough time in the day, or officials to run so many races... I think it is inevitable though. We have huge 4's turnouts, so the 3's field will grow, and in turn the 1,2's will grow to the point where it will be hard to not give us our own races.

[Brandy]

[ehirsch83]

Well I played support this weekend :-(

My shoulder is really bad and the BF didn't let me take my race wheels with us, I put them in the car, he took them out. I did take my bike, but I only rode it one day at that was to the feed zone and back for the road race(so only about 6 miles). I wish I could of raced, the 3/4s at Georgia looked weak. It took them an hour 39 to finish a 34 mile road course, and the crit was SLOW. Would of been a good weekend to pull out the sprint and the breakaway,hehe.

But anyways I played support for the BF in the CAT 3 men. He got 5th in the road race on sunday, out of 50 or so guys!! He was slightly dissapointed but he was the only one there without a team, and about 4 other teams were playing huge tactics with guys in the break and guys back in the pelaton holding off the field, so he is the only one who had to work the whole time(he is funny, he said he felt like a drill sergeant out there, making the other guys work because they were letting the pelaton close the gap, he got them to open it back up)

So I got to drive 16 hours this weekend and play support, and I have to say it wasn't to bad:-) But now hearing how everyone else did I wish I had raced.

Good job everyone!! And congrats Brandy on your first crit :-) you look awesome