Minnesota State Championships

By Lieselot Decroix

On Saturday June 24th, I raced the Minnesota State Championship Road Race in Zumbro Falls.

The women's 1/2/3 had to race together, 4 laps of 14 miles with rolling hills, 1 bigger hill of about a mile, wind and hot weather. However the course was beautiful, there wasn't a big turnout; only 13 women!

The Bella's were well represented with 6 of us in the race. We started with a rolling start at the bottom of the hill. Because the group was so small, no one really wanted to race in the beginning, what resulted in a slow first 2 laps. On the third time we hit the hill, I accelerated a little bit to see who would be my biggest opponents, but on top of the hill, I saw that we lost all the other bella's, except Margot was still with me. We talked and decided to wait a little bit and 2 other bellas came back.

The last time we hit the hill and then we had one more lap to go, a girl named Ann who finished Nature Valley last week and who is pretty strong (she had always beaten me in the sprint when we got away together in other races), picked up the pace on the hill and when we came on top, we saw that it was only her, me and another Ann (who's a pro-MTB) left and we had dropped all the other ones.

We cruised the last lap and the time gap with the other girls only grew and grew up to 3 minutes. In the last mile, I took Ann's wheel and just stayed on her wheel. The last 300m before the finish, which were strongly uphill, I sprinted out of her wheel and won surprisingly easily.

I received the Minnesota State Championship RR golden medal, so I am the Minnesotan state champion now, even though I am still Belgian haha! The next bella's were Margot Herman who took 4th and Sheryl Golin who took 7th.