I am in Chicago now for a weekend of racing. The 340m sprint today was contested on semi-wet pavement with impending threat of thunderstorm. Sprint is not my thing and I know the pro women field is competitive. I had only a few things to "achieve": no DNS, no DNF, and no crashing. Heh.
Prior to the start of the race, I had to do a 600m running sprint much to my dismay. It is amusing now that I think about it but at the moment, I certainly was not pleased. Due to some confusion of the event schedule, I thought the pro women races would start after the pro men and pro masters men. So when the organizers called all the skaters to draw starting order, SH, ME, and I had not yet put our skates on. We were only finishing our off-skate warm up. When we found out that the pro women were the second group to start, we rushed to our cars to put on our gear. Unfortunately, the car key was nowhere to be found at the designated location and our skates were locked inside the car. I ran as fast as I could to the start line to ask PD where the keys went and he told me JeP had it. I ran like a mad woman back to the car while yelling out JeP's name in hopes of catching his attention in the crowd. Luckily, he already arrived at the car with ME and we finally got our hands on our skates. I was absolutely out of breath at this point and not exactly in a calm-and-collect state of mind. It was only funny because I had absolutely no expectations about this race.
I was nervous about grip on the semi-wet pavement and my left skate felt funny. I did not even remotely get into the pack and finished the race trailing behind everyone else by a large margin. It was actually a bit embarrassing. After I returned to the hotel room, I discovered that I mixed up my wheels when I changed them in haste so had opposite order of how I mixed the wheels on each skate. No wonder it felt odd!
Comments