Hey folks,
At the request of a few friends, I'll be turning up the posting here for the next few weeks. For that, I call shameless promotion: You can also read that moron to the right's musings at Above the Rim and Inside Pitch. Click away (or don't, I won't blame you).
Aight well ITTs are over. Congrats to Kristi Hewitt and Isaac Neff for taking top slots. Now it's time for Miss-N-Out.
On its surface, Miss-N-Out is a sprinter's event. It basically works like this:
-Your ITT place seeds you into one of a number of heats.
-After one fly (free) lap, the pace picks up in each group, and the last person to cross the start/finish line in each subsequent lap is called out. The heats are whittled down to three riders who move on.
-Eventually, the field is whittled down to six (my memory fails me a bit, plus I've never gotten near that far, so I could be wrong) riders who form the final heat. Three riders are eliminated, then another fly lap is taken, and the first rider across the line on the lap after that takes home the prize.
*Disclaimer: I may have gotten some of this wrong in the details. You're reading the words of a man who's never made it past the first callout of his first heat - a sprinter I am not.
On it's surface, as I said, Miss-N-Out is a sprinter's event. But to the riders who will make it to the end, it's much more.
It takes a special rider to get through all those sprints for the line, keep digging for the stripe, then get off the track and back on the trainer/rollers to stay warm for sometimes more than an hour while waiting for their next heat.
It's a test of endurance, considering the first heats start around (a student's) breakfast time and the last heat usually runs at around 4 p.m. You've got to have the legs to sprint, the constitution to last all day and the confidence to keep switching between the track and the warm-up without losing anything either place.
It's a blast to watch, so I'd suggest you come out, especially in the afternoon as the heats speed up. That'll give you time to sleep off Friday night too.
See you there.
