It is always nice to be able to race locally so I was happy to race this year's edition of The Provincial Track Championships at my home velodrome, with the event being hosted by the Greater Victoria Velodrome Association.
With the wild fire smoke having cleared up a bit for at least a few days, conditions were warm and near perfect for the weekend’s events. It was super fun to have five TRT athletes out racing including myself and Callie making up a significant contingent of the women's endurance field, which was a small group of strong riders.
Teamwork is not actually permitted in any way on the velodrome - unless you are racing a team event - so though we couldn’t work together in the races it was nice racing side by side with someone you are comfortable with after a full road season of smashing stage races together!
I decided to race all the events, from the Team Sprint and the Madison on Friday to the Omnium and the Keirin on Saturday, and finally the sprint tournament and the timed events on Sunday. This made for a very long, tiring weekend but also let me gain lots of good experience and learn from each race, which is what counts right now as we are preparing for track nationals at the end of September.
The Omnium competition, which is made up of four different style bunch races run over the course of the full day, culminating in a final points ranking was very exciting and challenging despite our small field. By the end of four events Callie and I were actually tied for points, which is pretty cool!
It came down to breaking the tie based on who won the last sprint of the last race which happened to be me. We stood on first and second steps of the podium, and then this was reversed the following day when Callie had an amazingly fast Individual Pursuit, taking the Provincial jersey for that event, where I placed second.
We both look forward to carrying on training and then bringing our A-Game to Nationals in just over a month!