Pan Am Championships - Santiago, Chile

Although I was real disappointed to get sick at nationals, I at least had another race coming up. I qualified for the Pan Am Championship in Santiago, Chile for team pursuit. After nationals, I went home for a few days, then out to Colorado Springs to train with Jen, Sarah, Ruth, and Kelly.

We had some great training on the track, road, watt bike torture chamber, and gym! The Olympic Training Center is so cool!

We arrived to Chile early and got some extra training track on the track in Santiago. The track was absolutely beautiful!

Mountains outside track

Beautiful lighting.

Warmup

It was pretty cold our first few days there, as you can see with all our full on clothing!

But going fast kept us warm!

The tempature picked up as the week went on - we even took off our leg warmers!

Video review time!

Here I am for a solo effort.

Unfortuantely a couple days before the race, I crashed in practice. I got more splinters than you could even imagine! It wasn't a bad crash, and I was okay, but unfortunately as a result I did not race. It was a pretty hard and disappointing week for me. It is hard to train so hard and so long, with all the build up, and not race. But I tried to be the best teammate I could, help out, cheer, and do whatever I could to help out. The team did great - they won the team pursuit and set a new national record! It was so cool! All of Team USA had great results too! Jen won the IP and Scratch, Sarah won the Omnium, Jake and Bobby won the madison, Kim got silver in the Points race and Kelly got silver in the IP. Here are all the medals the US racked up for the week!

And now for a bit of culture: Santiago was a really cool city! On Sunday the main street in town is closed down to bicyclists, roller skaters, etc. It was amazing to see how many people were out!