Getting dizzy...

So my season has started. The Bay Criterium Series and National Championships are done for another year and I can now focus on my European season. But before I head off to sunny (or so I hope) Mallorca, Spain for my first professional training camp I thought I should give you the run down on my last week and a bit of racing.

The Bay Crit Series, as I mentioned in my last blog, is a series of 4 (or usually 5) closed circuit races held in and around Geelong every January. While some serious racing goes on the series has a fantastic atmosphere to it that is the closest Australia gets to the huge criteriums that come in the weeks after the TdF.

I was fortunate to be asked by the MB cycles team, or the team I raced for in China early last year, to join the team as their sprinter for the series. I joined fellow Canberra rider, Jess MacLean, my roomie from the New Zeeland tour, Davina Summers and two strong club riders, Liz Young and Kate Finnegan on the MB team.

Marcel Benson- the team manager- is a huge supporter of female cycling and does an enormous amount for the sport so it was great to throw on the pink and white colours once more and try and have a crack at the overall title, something I narrowly missed out on in 2009 when I finished 3rd overall to Kirsty Broun and Josie Tomic.

In the four days of racing I finished consistently taking two seconds and a third which gave me second overall. It was a little disappointing not to claim a stage win but definitely gives me something to aim for in 2011.

Rochelle Gilmore and her Honda dream team were incredibly dominant throughout the series with Rochelle claiming an impressive three wins.

Only a few days later I was taking the start line of the National Criterium Championships in Ballarat, kitted out for the first time in my very own hTC-Columbia kit, (well pretty much, my jerseys got lost on the way from Europe to Australia so I was borrowing Judith Arndts, a former world champion, so it wasn’t a bad jersey to borrow!)

Eagar to redeem myself from the week before, I went into the race wanting to win. After having replied to a question posed to me at dinner the night before by some of my hTC team mates who were in Australia early to pre-pare for the Tour Down Under (TDU) and do reconnaissance of this year’ s world course that ‘I could win’ I had really put the pressure on.

Rocking up to the start line with the two mechanics and masseurs that the team had brought over for the Tour Down Under was a pretty surreal experience, as was the pre race conversation I had with André Greipel, the current leader of the TDU, about tactics for the sprint finish.

Unfortunately, the aggression of the AIS team throughout the race paid off and an early attack by Carly Light, a relative newcomer of the sport proved to be the winning move leaving myself and the rest of the bunch to fight it out for the minor places, and the U23 National Championship Title as Carly was a senior rider.

I was able to take out the bunch kick ahead of Megan Dunn and Rochelle Gilmore which meant I claimed second overall and the U23 category win-two medals in one race...greedy I know.
While it was disappointing not to claim the elite women’s National Champion title and the green and gold stripes, the U23 National Champion title was a sufficient consolation prize.