The plan for the national track championships was to ride only the points race, with the goal to qualify for the final. Although I didn't make that goal, I did get a good result in another eThe next dayvent as I was asked to ride the 1 km TT as a tandem pilot for Tommy van den Eijnde at the very last moment.
In the qualification heat for the points race, I had some bad luck with the draw as I was in the heat with much stronger riders than the other heat. Obviously that didn't help my chances to make my goal and qualify for the final later that night, but I was confident that I was in good shape and still had a good shot at making it through the qualification heat. At the start of the race, I was riding near the front of the field looking for a group to escape, hoping to ride with them and sneak in some points which would basically guarantee a place in the final. Unfortunately, this didn't happen and after a while I ended up in the back of the field. Here racing was very nervous, and my lack of experience with races at this level became very obvious. For this reason, I was unable to move back up to the front and eventually ended up behind some gaps and could not get back, so I got lapped and was out for a chance to qualify for the final.
By that time I had to change my focus toward the 1 km TT on the tandem with Tommy van den Eijnde the next day. As we had never ridden together before, and the bike was not set up for me and was even still missing some parts, we had to start preparing very soon. We managed to set up the bike and even get in a few laps on the track before the day would end.
The next day it was time for our race. As we started our warm up early. while the race program got delayed, we had a very long warm up. The with most of the races before ours, there were false starts so both Tommy and me got a bit nervous as this was the first official race for both of us, immediately at the national championships. In our start, we gave too much power and misaligned the rear wheel to get a false start. This raised the pressure even further. In our second start, we had to hold back quit a lot to make sure the rear wheel remained fixed in the bike. But when we could finally five full power, Tommy showed his huge peak power to accelerate us to very high speeds, that were hard to handle for me as a pilot with so litle experience. But in the end we set a good time of 1.10.3 which was 4th fastest and 7th overall in a combined classification with the women's teams in a score relative to the world record times.
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