Blog
Well Belgium went out with a bang, and after a long day of travelling we arrived in humid JFK Airport, New York. We were greeted by Dayle and Cath Cheatley who took us on the 2.5 hour drive to our home for the next two months: Main Street, Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
We've got a pretty cool set up here - two ground level apartments with decent kitchens (apart from the super sensitive smoke alarms which can't be switched off until the fire department/police arrive, we've been lucky and only set it off 4 times though...) and the all essential air conditioning units. In the first photo you can see the passageway through to our houses, me and Novie (Shane Archbold) have the room to the right on the bottom floor that you can see). The only real downside is the regular trips to the Laundromat 4 blocks down the road to wash cycling kit, and every so often my underwear and maybe a t-shirt...
The training in the local area is also really good, better than Belgium in the way that we no longer have to ride on the bikepaths/footpaths and there is actually a variance in the terrain rather than being dead flat everywhere. Our main priority has been the track racing, in order to both make enough money to pay the food bills each week and also for the experience of racing against some of the best track riders around. Between the six of us (myself, Shane Archbold, Shem Rodger, Tom Scully, Myron Simpson and Jason Christie) we have won a few races between the Tuesday and Friday nights racing, my best day was a Tuesday when I was the first to lap the field in the prestigious 10 Mile Scratch, taking a $50 bonus, and also winning the final sprint (well, there was one of the Olympic Polish sprinters in front of me but luckily he was a lap down) to take the $35 Crowd bonus (the organisers sometimes go around with a bucket collecting pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and dollar notes from the audience) which re-tested my maths skills when it came to splitting it up with the guys. Included are two pics from the track, one of everyone on the rail before a race (there are a few more spectators than Friday at Manukau!) and a mid-Madison sling between me and Novie.
Another part of being here that I have really enjoyed is the Criterium racing on the road. We did a bit one in the first week of being here called the Iron Hill Twilight Criterium. It was a super hard race, I was the only one of us that managed to finish, but got pipped by two places out of a cut of the $15000 with 32nd place. The next Crit we did had the rather extravagant name of the Grandview Grand Prix. The plan for this race was a bit different, everyone was told to race as individuals and the first two across the line would get to travel to Charlotte, North Carolina to race in one of the biggest races on the the US race calendar, the $50000 Charlotte Criterium. There's a photo of everyone sitting on the grass before both the race and the tension begun. Luckily, I had some of the best feeling legs of my life for the race, and about half way through the race I had got myself into what turned out to be the winning break with Shem, Scud (Tom Scully) and Novie and about 5 others. With 2 laps to go everyone else had popped (Scud quite literally when he pushed an off-camber corner a wee bit too hard and hit the deck - but he was ok), apart from me, Novie and two other riders who turned out to be best mates. Anyway to cut a long story short, my sprint obviously wasn't quite at the same level as our recent Double World Champion's, the star Sam Webster, and I found myself having to settle for 2nd across the line. But still an awesome race. So this left Novie and myself as the two riders to get to go to Charlotte.
The big catch of this trip was the 9 hour drive to get to the racing. We hitched a ride with fellow Kiwi Dale Tye and one of her locally based team mates, Kate, in her big Chevy van. A couple of nights earlier we had a pot-luck dinner at Kate and her partner Mike's house which was great. Scud Novie and myself went a bit next level and dressed up as the Amish Basketball team, showing off the mighty tan lines (there are a lot of Amish in this area, most days you will see horse and carts going down the main roads), in the attached picture are the three of us teamed up with their rather large Great Dane named Major. The drive ended up not being too bad, and the hotel we stayed in was great. It was called the Double Tree, and is part of the Hilton chain, the best part being the warm Macadamia Cookies you receive upon check in (however, check in wasn't the only time we managed to score some of the delicious biscuits!). We ended up arriving at about 8pm on the Friday, with our race starting at 7:00pm the next day. North Carolina was a lot different to Pennsylvannia, which we observed from our ride to spin the legs out the next morning. If you went 500m to the right out of our hotel, you ended up at the bottom of the modern high rise buildings, but if when left the same distance it became a run-down residential area, but with some of the biggest and newest Churches I have ever seen. So after the wee ride, and a giggle at a dude who bailed off his superbike while trying to ride it on the grass, it was back to the hotel to cook our bags of rice to have with tuna in the electric jug we had packed from home, rather than the 3 course meal in the hotel restaurant unfortunately...
It was down to the start line pretty early that night, as I learnt in Iron Hill you don't want to start at the back of these Crits as it can be virtually impossible to get from the very back to the front sometimes. The crowd was huge, announcer claimed 30,000, and it was so hot that I had sweat running off me while waiting at the start line without even having my helmet on. And as expected, the pedal was to the metal as soon as the airgun was sounded (suprisingly no American National Anthem before the start today which you normally have to take your helmet off for). This was a 50mile (80km) Criterium so by far the longest I have ever done, it hurt a lot, but I was happy to finish and finished 30th for the bonus of being just inside the money for $65 (not quite the $12500 for the win, but still learning).
The other bonus about going all the way down for that Crit was that we also got to do another one on Sunday afternoon before driving back home, called Hanes Park – Hanes as in the Hanes clothing/textile company. It was hot, real hot, my SRM was showing 42°C on the start line, and the fact that there was a small climb on each of the many laps (this was a 90minute timed crit) really got the sweat glands going. Its a whole different experience racing in those kind of temperatures, it becomes taxing even thinking about how you are going to go round the corners, let alone avoid the crashes that happening in front of you. This is what ended up happening on the inside of me on first corner of the last lap, a crash, which meant by the time I had got around around it there were already 80+ riders in front of me so I had to settle for 72nd. Novie did well and claimed 12th in the final sprint.
Well that's about all the excitement that I think there is room for in this update, if only I could write this much in my 6th Form Shakespear Essays I might've got a decent mark for English... But I am now well underway with my Extramural Bacholar of Business study, after having to put Engineering on hold at the start of the year because of this trip. Which is partly the reason it has taken me so long to finally get this update out.
Contact me at aaron.gate@gmail.com