Sprinting is not my bag baby...

Got beat out in the pursuit finals last night for various reasons. The primary one being lack of experience. I know that we are stronger and that we will school them next year :)

So, today was supposed to be a day of recovery riding with some strong efforts, but the other two Canadian tandem teams decided to make a late entry into the 200m sprint. We had no intentions of doing the sprint because neither Brian or I like sprints and we are both quite horrible at them. Not to mention the fact that we had never done one together before. But, we couldn’t let the other teams do one and not see how we measure up against them so we borrowed some sprint bars and entered the race :)

Now, one of the hardest parts of the 200m sprint is holding the bike steady while going well over 60km/h through the corners and then sitting down at some point to finish the ride. Normally, the riders will start up on the rail of the track and then dive down to the bottom of the track to use gravity to accelerate the bike. Both riders will also stand up and push as hard as they can for about the first half of the sprint and then sit down together. Now, Brian and I had never done one of these together before, and we got a pretty fast lap in our kilo while sitting down so we thought that we would try a slightly different strategy. Instead of dive bombing down just before the start of the first lap and then struggling to maintain control of the bike, Brian suggested that we dive down a half-lap early and just accelerate through the corner. We were the ONLY team that did this, but it still scored us a 10th place finish and the top Canadian spot :P