Sunday, March 02, 2008

The Most Elusive and Lucrative Win of My Career

Each spring, up here in Vancouver, BC the largest development team in the area - dEVo - puts on a lovely set of 10 races held over each and every weekend in March called the Spring Series. Generally the weather is a little off of nice (read torrential downpour) and hypothermia is not unheard of...okay, well now I'm being a little melodramatic, but they do tend to provide true Canadian tough conditions.

This morning close to 300 riders congregated for the first roadrace of 2008 - River Road - Spring Series #1. I went in with a little bit of apprehension as last year I made the break with about 30km to go and was dragged along to the finish (with some moral support from both Cody Campbell and Jonathan Page) to finish up 3rd (thank you yellow line violator!). So last year's success haunted me a little as I REALLY wanted to upshow myself from 2007 - what with this being my first representation of the Vanderkittens on home turf. The race itself was fairly uneventful. Or perhaps that is not the word as there were more crashes than I could count (Laura get better fast!) and people were trying to attack, but in good cat 3/4 form, EVERYTHING was brought back. Oh - as an aside, at the Spring Series there are only 3 categories for everyone - A, B, C - I take part in the B category with all my buddies in cat 3/4 men, the juniors, the majority of the women, and often anyone else who wants to show ;).

Coming into the last 2km the pack was really very close together, thereby making it rather difficult to move around. On this course the finish line sits about 800m out of the final turn and today we had a good headwind rushing the straight. Consequently, I wasn't too concerned about my positioning out of the final corner as I knew that this one was a sprint of patience. Rounding the corner I was in the top 15-20 and I continued to move up. First to the lefthand side of the road, then I saw it open up to my right and I swooped to that side (doesn't that make me sound like a superhero) - then things seemed to go into slow motion as I realized that I was going to win. I jumped around my last two competitors in the last 50m to take it at the line... by at least 2 inches!

Bruce Denis was a great sport about losing to a girl ;) and Chris was impressed as he has difficulty beating Bruce on the track this winter! Speaking of which - huge props to Chris who was in a 2 man breakaway with 10km to go before his race was called due to a crash victim in the middle of the road.

And with the race report out of the way, why was this the most elusive and lucrative win of my career you ask? Well elusive - come on now - who doesn't want to ROCK the world in March - many people would agree that the Spring Series are the be all and end all of the season (please note the irony!) And for lucrative - well today kids, for my first place finish I took home a big 25 bones! That's right baby, making my net income for the day $(1). I'm not actually complaining as I really enjoy these training races and it's nice to have an opportunity to get some good, cheap racing in!

So now that win #1 of the season on my fancy new BH is under my belt, we up the training and prep for more success!!! PS - I am hoping that maybe there are a few pics online from today - and I will post one later if a suitable one is found.

4 comments:

Liz Hatch said...

Nice one, Jen! Can't wait to add my name to this list. So far you Canadians are "beating" the rest of the team. ;)
Hugs from CA!

goat said...

Way to go - I was thrilled to see your update! Thanks, and keep kickin' it for VK!

Mandy said...

congrats, jenny!!!!
can't wait to see you around at races. maybe in may?
be good
mandy

Anonymous said...

nice win, thanks for giving dEVo props. i think you were training with the juniors at the track wednesday, i was there, it was soo fun, except that drill behind the moto is pretty gnarly fast.