FLASH-POINT BLOGGER: BRI KOVAC

Well, it's taken me a while to update, yet again, but I've been busy and have some great news!  First off, I received the new decals for my flashpoints and got them all set up and they look fantastic.  I love the new design, and I'm excited to show the wheels off this fall!
On the racing front, things have been AMAZING!  This past weekend was collegiate track nationals at the Major Taylor Velodrome here in Indianapolis!  It's been an event I've been really amped about and training hard for and I ended up winning the Individual Pursuit and scoring the Stars & Bars!!  Also, my two amazing teammates - Pam Loebig and Katie Thompson - and I won the Team Sprint!!  The team as a whole did a great job, landing lots of medals and ending up 2nd overall in the team omnium against a bunch of teams who focus solely on the track all year!  It was fantastic!  Thanks to all who came out to support us and who helped us along the way!

So I finally got a chance to race on the Flashpoints!  In late July each year, we have a race in my hometown, Zionsville, IN, downtown on the main street.  What makes this race unique is that Main Street is a brick road, so for 1/4 of each lap we are racing on the cobbles (our own little Paris Roubaix!).  I decided to race the Flashpoints for the first time this season, and they came away victorious!!  They handled the bricks beautifully and accelerated nicely coming out of each corner!  It was a blast!
 
 

OK, ok first off, let me throw out an apology for my recently developed inability to update my blog!  I have been swamped!  Between finals, nationals, racing, work, training...  yea, yea, yea you've all heard the story I'm sure!
It's been a long time, so a race-by-race update would be a bit much to read - but here are the highlights!  My first big races of the season were the 2006 NCAA Collegiate Nationals in Lawrence, KS - a weekend of fun, festivities, ridiculously large field sizes, and oh yea, 30+mph winds the entire time!  There is a TTT on Friday, a road race Saturday, and a crit on Sunday.  I was really looking forward to the TTT but when Friday rolled around it became apparent we'd have a 32 mph headwind for over 8 miles of the open course!  Our team started off strong, with the fastest split of the day coming through the first time check, but then the wind got the best of us and we ended up in 5th.  I was hoping the wind would continue for the road race, as the course wasn't really hilly enough to break things up - but unfortunately our race was early in the morning so things were relatively calm.  I attacked on virtually every climb and crosswind section, but just wasn't able to make anything stick.  The crazy part of our race came with 6 miles to the go when a huge crash took out almost half of our 90+ person field!  It was so devastating that they had to STOP the D2 women's race behind us and wait for things to get cleared up before they could finish their race!  By the time the sprint rolled around I had pretty much shot my legs from attacking, so I finished a disappointing seventh.  The crit the next day was a BLAST!  An 8 corner, figure 8 course with a steady grade up the entire back side.  Less than 10 minutes into the race Sarah Uhl and Rebecca Larson - two super-amazing professional racers - got in a break by themselves.  I knew that was something to worry about, so I rode up to it and the three of us were off the front for a significant amount of time.  Apparently this shattered the field, because when we finally got caught there were only 30 or so people left!!!  The rest of the race was attack after attack, and I ended up finishing in 6th.  I took the last corner before the downhill a little conservatively and it hurt me at the finish!  I need to work on my sprint!!!
After tapering for nationals, it was time to amp up the training!  That's where the Flashpoints come in!  Our training rides have a tendency to get pretty heated - so having such a fast set of wheels to ride really helps out!  To this day, I have yet to have a single problem with the Flashpoints - and they have thousands of long, hard training miles on them!!!  I do notice a bit of drag in a cross-wind, but as my fellow Fanatics have noted - the extra weight helps counter that significantly more than with lighter wheels.  I definitely feel comfortable riding them in much windier conditions than my Zipps.
The local race scene has also been a blast!  My teammate Tracy Huber is so incredibly strong and the two of us have really been working on ironing out our race strategy!  We're on a roll right now and have managed to win all of the races we've been in together so far this year!  A good majority of the time we've gone 1 & 2 off the front!  Things are just really coming together really well and it's great to have such a strong team!  We've also been testing the water out on the velodrome this year.  Tracy has raced on the track before - and actually racked up a national championship in the team sprint (I think) at masters nationals last year - but I've never done anything but just ride around!  We raced for the first time a few weekends ago and went 1 & 2 in two of the races and got second in the third!  We've gotten up to the track a bit more to train - it adds a nice change to the typical training routine.  Maybe one day I'll be able to translate it into a sprint out on the road :)
Ok, one last race of note, then I'll call it a day - I won my first big (i.e. not local) race at Melon City in Iowa over Memorial Day weekend!  If you haven't done the Memorial Day Weekend races you HAVE to go next year and you're in for a treat!  Interesting, challenging courses, huge fields, and lots of money!  It was a blast!  I had a rough first day in the Snake Alley Criterium, crashing twice on "the snake" - a 12% grade, switchback, brick road up the middle of Burlington, IA.  I chased back on both times despite a sideways saddle and crooked shift lever and managed to squeeze in a 10th place.  But Day 2 - Melon City - went way better!  This course is a ~1 mile loop with a rather significant winding hill up to a 180 degree turn to the finish!  Prior to the race I picked out the spot on the hill where I thought I should go - and quickly realized it was way too far out!  But come the last lap, everyone in the front had pulled off by that point and I just had to go for it up the hill!  I somehow managed to hold them off for the win!!!  It was amazing!!!
So needless to say, things are going pretty well.  This weekend is the track and then getting some good training miles in on the Flashpoints, then next weekend is the track state championships and Tour de Grandview - one of my favorite races of the year!
I'll keep you posted!