“Race” Report: 2024 Early Birds Week 2, Women’s Cat 4

“Race”: Early Birds clinic and practice crit series - week 2

Date: Sunday, January 14, 2024

AVRT racers: Emily Selman, Katie Monaghan, Katarina Zgraja, Robin Betz (mentoring - thank you!!) 

Top Result: Everyone wins at Early Birds! (But I’m pretty sure Kat won)

Course: 1 km square loop and is closed to traffic. Good pavement. Botts’ Dots down the middle. Four right turns. (Same course as “Shea Center Criterium” that took place in September 2023)

Strava: Emily’s, Katie’s, Kat’s, Robin’s

Nutrition: Peanut butter and jelly sandwich before and a granola bar between the clinic and “race”

Event Recap (written by Katie): Week 2 of early birds was focused on cornering! The WTFNB group was about half the size of last week (14 or so). We spent the first part of the clinic with some verbal instruction followed by drills to work on our cornering skills. Similar to last week, the group then set out for three 5 lap “races”. 

In the first race, one solo rider went out of the start fast, creating a large gap from the rest of the peloton. Emily chased her down and caught her draft for the first few laps. Kat and I were in the front of the second group and took turns pulling until we caught Emily and the other rider. This race ended with Kat in a sprint with two other solo riders and Emily and I close behind.

In the second and third race, Kat, Emily and I started to talk more about how we could help each other better during the race. We began to trade pulls more and quickly realized Kat was our best sprinter. The cornering was becoming smoother and overall the pace was faster than last week. We mainly were in single pacelines due to the small size of our field, which also probably helped our cornering skills. 

In the third race, our group started out more conservatively and rode closer together. I decided to pull ahead to see if we could stretch out the field some. My thought was to make a bit of a gap for the three of us away from the other riders. However, the attack was likely a little premature because I suffered on the last lap. We spent a lot of time between races hypothesizing the best strategies to race better as a team, so please share with us any of your tips! Safe to say, I think we all caught the crit bug and had a lot of fun.