Funny story—part of the reason I
chose to go to Whitman is the fact that they had a cycling team, even though
I’d never raced bikes before in my life.
I’d always ridden everywhere at home and I’d watched the Tour de France
for years, but it took till college for me to join a cycling team. And I am so glad I did.
My
first season was always fun—you can’t race a bike if you don’t enjoy riding a
bike—but for the first time in my life I learned that there were different
kinds of fun. You could have fun
laughing up a storm with your teammates or passing someone going down a hill,
but you could also have fun outsprinting someone at the finish line or climbing
the hardest hill of your life—even if your legs were hurting and you were
guiltily wondering how long you’d be able to keep it up before you toppled
over. There’s a Greg LeMond quote about
cycling that’s quite apt, that "It never gets easier, you just go faster."
And I love, love, love to go fast. I look forward to the day when I will have
the strength, endurance, and training to race a race where I will leave everyone
else in the dust—but until then I am happy to keep riding, keep climbing, and
keep having fun.
Speaking
of fun, here are some of my season highlights:
·
Racing my first race ever in my hometown of
Corvallis, OR
·
Sticking with the secondary peloton in Women’s B
for the whole Whitman RR to finish a second behind my teammate Jenna
·
Outsprinting 2-3 people at the finish line of
the WWU Crit
·
Passing another team for the first time in the
UW TT
·
Climbing the hardest hill of my life in the
Montana RR—and then finishing 9th, my first top 10 finish!
·
Getting 2nd in the Women’s B UI
Conference TT, which was a wonderful way to end the season, because it was a
team effort—Becca, Kristin and Jenna, you are some of the best TT teammates a
girl could ask for!
·
Wearing Rachel’s sequined silver bellbottoms on
the Conference podium :p
·
Making friends on the other teams—cyclists are
pretty cool
·
Cheering on my teammates—they’re all pretty
excellent J
·
Knowing that every single race weekend will turn
into a giant team laughfest at some point
·
Looking forward to next season, because I know
it’ll be just as much of a blast as this one was J
See you next year!
Rose
J
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