Team Pursuit Recap

Another spring series event in the books. Once again, a disappointing finish. Our strategy from the start was to take the first few laps at a slightly less than grueling pace in order to save our legs for the latter of the 15 laps. After posting a pretty poor first lap (51-52 seconds), we really started putting the hammer down. Shields made a couple mistakes which in the end cost us a few extra seconds, and the lack of any (strong or not strong) fourth rider contributed to our 23rd place finish. We are a completely different team than we were over spring break. During spring break, we all looked like (dare I say) a dark-horse in this years deep Little 500 field. After the quals debacle, most of the team took a brief leave of absence mentally from the focus and dedication that is required to compete in this race. That small lapse of faith has been taxing on the entire team, and as school started consuming precious track hours, the team time we have put in the saddle has dwindled.

We have 5 days until the race, and 3 days until the track is closed. In this very short amount of time, we need to get back the "team" spirit we had coming out of spring break. We are not out of the race by a long shot, and assuming we can put in a solid level laps and stay safe, we might be able to shake off the teams that we know we are capable of beating. While the rest of the campus is drunk and clueless, we need to polish up our act and really put all of our efforts and focus into race day prep. I am sure we are out of contention by the opinions of the "experts" but I'm not going to give up. I plan to prove them wrong and say "whoa, where'd THEY come from?" We have worked too long and too hard to post another embarrassing performance. We've got 200 laps to prove ourselves, and we plan to go like hell.

Again, thanks for all the support we've gotten, it is without this support than any lesser team would have given up by now. Hang tight and hang on, this is going to be a long and rough ride.