September 2010 – Texas A&M Cycling Team

UH Race Weekend at Lake Conroe

By Shane Haga

The second race weekend of this year’s mountain season found a handful of Aggies taking a trip to Lake Conroe. I’ll do my best to accurately describe the events as they unfolded, but my mind has had almost a full week to forget/ embellish what may or may not have happened.

Shane Haga - UH @ Lake Conroe The trip began with a sleepy 6 am drive to Coldsprings. At this point I would like to mention that all the racers comfortably fit into two rental vehicles—this is unacceptable. We need more people racing if we want to maintain our conference win streak! But I digress. We arrived early with much time to spare before the 9:30 start for the time trial. We quickly unloaded the trailer, registered, and went out for a couple laps to get used to the course. Let me go ahead and put the rumors to rest here: It has been said that the trail is dangerously flat and lacking in technical difficulty—these rumors are entirely true. The course was somewhere in the neighborhood of “3 miles”, and reasonably wide, though lacking in markings.

Track Elite Regional / National Qualifier

By Andrew Carlberg

While most of the team was out racing mountain bikes for the weekend, several Aggies ventured to the Alkek Velodrome for Elite Regionals and National Qualifier. This event would bring some great talent to the Velodrome and gave us a chance to see just how fast on the track we had become. One of my favorite things to do on the track is warm up. I know that seems really strangle but going around in circles for 25 laps slowly getting faster until you just have one lap left and you’re spinning is like crazy oddly awesome. First up in a busy weekend of events (3 sessions in 2 days) was the Team Pursuit. Pretty much its you and 3 other guys going as fast as you can for just 4 kilometers. Team Maroon Flash consisted of Austin Throop, Brian Hare, Carlton Mathis, and freelancer Brenden Sharp quickly set the best time of 5:34 (it helped that they were the 1st of 8 teams).

Stolen Fuji is Back!

This is the story of how I got Fuji back. It’s not going to get made into a movie or even told over the listserve for years to come but I’m under some pressure to tell how I finally got him back so here goes.

Last spring while studying very very late for an exam in the Jack E. Brown building, Fuji was stolen from the bike rack outside. Yes, it was a cable lock and yes, I now have a Kryptonite U-lock. I reported it to the campus police the next day, gave them the most detailed description of a bike as you can possibly give and even printed out a picture for them. I had some hope but not a lot.