The night before was spent in typical friday night fashion with me not going to bed at a reasonable time. This meant an also typical measly 4 hours of sleep before waking up for work. I packed my track bike in the car with the plan of working until 2, closing the shop, eating some chinese food, taking a nap in the shop, and then heading off to new jersey. Instead, Shane convinced me to head home to get my road bike so we could ride on sunday. So I worked, closed, raced home, packed a second bike and a wide variety of winter clothing, ate a big plate of leftover meatloaf (delicious!), took a 15 minute nap and then drove off to NJ.
I got to Asbury Park around 6:30, got registered and changed, and waited for my team-mates to show up. My brother and his wife also made the trip down, which was really nice to see. Eventually Jen and Genisis showed up, with Genisis' boyfriend Aaron also coming. We warmed up and then started the 500m seeding. These were done alphabetically, so I was the last to go for the men. My first attempt I got very squirrelly and fell off, which was the first crash of the day.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453679
They allowed me a re-ride, so I checked over my bike, which seemed fine except for some bar tape that got burned off by the spinning roller. This ride felt much more stable, and I came out with the fastest qualifying time of 16.8s.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453660
After the men's qualifiers was the womens, in which Jen and Genisis pulled out a 23.8 and 25.2 respectively.
The times were then organized in a typical match sprint bracket with first vs last, 2nd vs 2nd last, etc. My first race was against Jeff M. If memory serves me correctly, he crashed just a little bit after the first lap, but rather than re-ride, he just conceded to me, which I didn't really feel too good about.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453641
An interesting thing about this setup is that the riders were facing the dial this time, so you could actually see how you were doing in each race. This means you can really pace yourself in the early rounds. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.
The second heat was against Gorgi P. At this point all the heats blend together, but I think this was the race where I tried a little dig just to see how quickly I could get accelerating again.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453630
It was around this point that I was really starting to feel the lack of sleep and partial lack of food. I was a little dizzy and lightheaded, which isn't the best for roller racing. My brother went out and got me a coffee and I ate a few bite-size snickers since I took too long to get some of the free pizza. This helped ground me a bit.
Round three found me vs Chris G. Again, don't really remember anything. What I do remember is thinking that Andrew B looked like he was working a lot harder to get through his rounds than I was.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453621
The final round was the big show with me against Andrew B. I took the early lead, but Andrew clawed it back around halfway through. I saw this and put my head down and tried to lay on the leg speed. This meant I wasn't looking at the dial anymore, but from what I've been told, I slowly slid my way back up into the lead. Then Andrew crashed with maybe 25m to the finish or so. He called me the winner, which was fine by me.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/266453600
Things of note:
-I rode the blue rollers each race.
-I used a 51x14 gear.
And here's some video of the final:
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