First night of track - Marymoor preseason

It's track time finally! Woohoo. You can see the newly completed building for offical track business.

Here is a picture of my bike ready for action.

At 4:15 I got an email that racing was canceled and I was so sad. It didn't look like it was going to rain and I really wanted to ride my bike on the track. So I decided to head out to Marymoor anyway and just ride around. When I got there, the officials had their table set up already and as I was cruising around I yelled "is track on?" YES!

We had 11 women in my race and Jen raced with the faster group. We had a scratch race, a tempo race, and a 4x4. I was a bit nervous since I was riding my new bike for the first time in a race but everything was fine. No points were on the line anyway. I need to get used to riding in the middle of the group though instead of the back. On the tempo race I went for the first lap and ended up third - for no points. I'm going to have to work on my jump and sprint! It was harder than I thought it was going to be but lots of fun.

There were also little birds on the track. Not the kind that stop and fly away when you get there - no - nesting killdeer with babies and the babies were on the track and we had to avoid them. Luckily everyone survived. It was the craziest thing. Apparently the killdeer birds use lawns as their breeding habitat and in this case it was the infield of the track. They try to distract preditors from the nest by faking a wing injury and sliding around in the grass. It was so bizare to see a bird looking like it was hurt while we were trying to warm up in the infield. The babies were at the very top of the turn and I don't know what exactly they were trying to do. Someone finally went moved them to a safer place.

Here are a couple of videos of the race after me:

The track announcer is really funny. He always says stuff like " and the crowd is going wild" before anybody starts cheering. Circ du soleil has a tent next to the track which complicates the parking (if you think you are going the wrong way it's probably right). As the show was getting out the announcer was trying to entice the crowd to watch the races. "regional, national, and internation class riders are racing bikes in the velodrome - come by and grab a spot while they are still available!" Hee hee he left out local.