Often following a race which didn’t go quite as planned, the motivation to write about it, is as you can imagine, not high. Last weekend we had to sit in a car for a ridiculously long time to get to our destination and racing venue for the weekend, Tulsa.

 

Tulsa is a pretty bad ass city I might add. We managed to explore a bit of the city on our morning leg loosener spins on the numerous bike paths. We also found not one, but two awesome coffee shops! Something I can’t say happens often on our travels.

 

Exploring the city on the awesome bike paths.

A great coffee in an interesting mug….

Another highlight of the trip was catching up with a good friend from back home, Jos Le Roux. Jos has been riding on the Get Crackin team out of California this year. Our friendship goes back a few years, to my first year at University in fact. I think our trip up to Vanderbijlpark for the annual SASSU Student Tour cemented our friendship and over the years we have spent many hours together riding our bikes all over South Africa, Belgium and now the USA.

 

So the racing part, personally I didn’t get the results I aspired to over the weekend. A few weeks ago I wrote about that, sometimes when the racing doesn’t quite go the way in which you want it to, I have found that you need to take a step back and look at the bigger perspective. It can also help in looking at what maybe went wrong. There were a couple of things that looking back on the weekend I can now say: “Ya maybe we could have done that a bit better, and that wasn’t quite right”. We live and learn don’t we.

 Cry Baby Hill Craziness!

Image Credit: Danny Munson/Cycling Illustrated

Blue Dome Criterium

Image Credit: Cycling Illustrated

I must say that the organisers of the Tulsa Tough and the city of Tulsa put on an absolutely fantastic event! The Tulsa Tough is a sort of ‘stage race’ of criteriums running from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. Each of the 3 races was so well supported by spectators that it was an absolute privilege to be able to race in front of them. They created an electric atmosphere and perhaps this is why I was a bit more disappointed than usual. I had heard about the famous “Cry Baby Hill” and the crazy spectators, it was all and more than I can imagine. My words won’t do it justice, take a few seconds a check out the YouTube clips (It’s worth waiting for the video to buffer even if you have super slow internet!)

Video Credit: John Doe

Lastly, a huge thank you to our fantastic host house over the weekend: Stephany and Jeff. They had gone so far into welcoming us into our home, that Stephany had checked our bio pages on the team site and saw what our favourite meals were and cooked them for us on Sunday evening. Junior Mint and I were both blown away!

 

This weekend we are off to Winston Salem for the Winston Salem Classic which comprises of a criterium on Saturday and road race on Sunday. We still have a busy month of racing coming up with the next SRS race next weekend in Albany which follows the same crit – road race format before we head north to Wisconsin for four days of the Tour of America’s Dairyland! Exciting times ahead!

 

Until next time,

 

Ciao
Chris

Image Credit: Ash Smit