Short track number four is in the books

This past Sunday was the winter short track series race number four and boy was it one to remember. The team had tremendous support with 27 people from the team showing up to race. This past weekend contained excitement with our new racers, heartbreak in the form of a chain, and as always, anguish as we all slobbered on our top tubes. This week the team with the largest amount of participants gained a valuable 20 extra points tacked on and it was double points for the individual categories.

To kick things off for the day we had a sizable beginner women's field totaling at 24 participants, three of them being our very own. Kayla Lingerfelt and Marcy Hubble were going to be competing in their first race alongside Katie Wilson who is in the points lead for the class. Kayla took a spill before the race even started on her warm up lap. At least she got it out of her system before the race started. Kayla soldiered on to get 18th place in her first race and Marcy did the awesome job of grabbing 14th. Katie, of no surprise to anyone, won her class again and further solidified her lead over the other women in the class.

The biggest group of the day was yet again the beginner men 40+ . The velo 16 BSG squad had an outstanding number of participants coming in at eight total for the one race. Broken hearts and torn taint meat soon befell the team as Terry Rudisill launched off the line and proceeded to pedal his chain right off his bike. Luckily he is alright and did not come out worse than he did. As his chain proceeded to break into different pieces his crotchel area took the majority of the impact as he collided with his top tube. With Terry out of the race and out of the points the team could only hope that we would win the extra 20 points for bringing the most people to the race. The Staminator won again but he did not have such a large margin of victory on this particular day as he had a competitor hot on his heels. For the greater part of the race, the two men were separated by mere seconds. Mike was being his normal self and talking throughout the entire race while you could see second place was struggling. As the final laps were closing in Mike opened a gap on second and solidified his victory. Shawn Rudisill rode his butt off to another impressive top five finish.

The rest of the day went fairly smooth with a lot of our racers gaining some valuable points towards the overall team competition. The final race of the day saw the American Classic boys show up and race which bumped the pace up.

If our calculations are correct we did indeed gain those extra twenty points for the team competition. This would have put us ahead in the points and would have almost surely gave us the overall win. Alas, with Terry not being able to finish all the points will do is to make sure we were still a contender for the overall at the last race. Cool Breeze should be ahead of us by nine points. We can make that up as we made up a lot in the second race but it will take a great deal of effort. This is not an easy task that has been set down before us but I know that we have to muscles to do it.

The team greatly appreciates everyone who came out and supported us as well as raced. We have a great group of people and we are grateful to have you. See everyone at the finale next week!!!