Team Race Blog

Tour of Christiana Criterium
Christiana, PA
Sunday, August 10
Women Open (Cat 4 scored separately)
Racers: Dori and Jen

The drive to Christiana was a little nerve-wracking; it rained, it stopped, it sprinkled, it stopped. Then, we arrived to the course, and the weather was dry, the ground was dry, and the sky was blue!! By the time 1:15pm rolled around, Dori and I were warmed up and ready to start. Unfortunately for me, my warm up was not as good as it should have been, and I was distracted and didn’t force myself to stay on the rollers long enough like I usually do. Having done the Church Creek TT the day before, my legs needed the warm up.

For those of you who have never seen the course, it is very technical with one steep hill. The race happens to start at the bottom of that hill, and as we were staging, I looked around to make sure my gearing was right with everyone else’s around me. Indeed, I didn’t want to be spinning when the Aarons, Juice Plus and Amorosa girls were powering up in the big ring in lap one. I chose to match my gearing with Aarons, but it didn’t really matter later anyway because it didn’t start out fast.

The first lap felt great, and strangely, there were already gaps! I made my way up to the middle and then to the front of the pack before and during the technical sections (this course had 9 turns total, and 8 were in the second half of the lap). I felt great, and I had a crazy impulse to attack on the second lap on the hill. Juice Plus went with me, and knowing that there weren’t any teams there to chase us down, I thought that perhaps something might stick. Having overestimated my ability at the time and my cornering comfort level that early in the race, I could not keep the pace and JP waited for me several times. Our 18 second gap diminshed, and I was gassed. Unfortunately for me, the course is absolutely unforgiving, and I paid dearly for being impulsive and dumb. I was off the back after that, and spent a couple of laps recovering before I soloed the last half of the race on my own. Fortunately for me, I still had good legs and ended up passing 4 people as I TTed through. The cheerleaders on the sidelines helped a lot, and I tried to cross the finish line with a gigantic smile as I was happily (yes, I was happily) powering up those climbs. With about 4 or 5 laps to go, it started to rain on half of the course (strange sensation that was). Then with 3 laps to go, it started POURING!! Cornering was fun in that weather, so I was sort of glad I was alone at that point (talking myself out of the disappointment of being off the front then off the back).

With two laps to go, I saw Dori and tried to chase her. She crossed the finish line right before me that lap, and our race was cut one lap short as the field came in right after us. Dori was super strong, super smart, and she ended up winning the Cat 4s and coming in 8th overall. I was 9th overall/8th in the 1/2/3s. If I heard the story correctly, Dori was in the field for most of the race until the Juice Plus girl was off the front, crashed, then chased down by the field because she didn’t take her free lap to keep her gap (!!), and when the field latched on to the JP girl that time (before she ATTACKED AGAIN), Dori lost her wheel. WOW! Fantastic job out there. I was so proud to see her do so well!

Since that was my first race back in about three weeks, I’m not too bummed. Learning to race smarter day by day.

Thanks for reading,
Jen Cheng

Filed under: Christiana by artemis