Last Friday, Carmen, Hannah, Michiel, Ramon and Tom went down to Maastricht to participate in the Uros teamrace. This race consists of a 5k loop up the St Pietersberg in a team of 4 till 7 people, where the time of the 4th person crossing the finish line counts. Every team starts with a two minute separation, which makes catching other teams a nice challenge. Hannah, Michiel, Ramon and Tom had all participated in the race one year prior, when the Sun was shining and the weather was nice and hot. Looking forward to the same weather this year, they were very disappointed to find that after arriving at the athletics track, the sun was not shining and it was cold and windy.
After arriving way to early due to Michiel's conservative planning, we all had a 'team meeting' in the equipment shed to stay semi warm during our one hour wait till the start. We mainly discussed whether or not to run in a singlet and shorts. After a fairly long discussion (we had some time to kill) we ended up choosing for the combination of a singlet (because purple pride duh) and long trousers (because windchill, combined with us being wimps).
During the warming up we had to discuss race tactics. Michiel suggested running as a team, to which the rest of the team was actually okay as this would have meant a nice sightseeing, enjoying the Maastricht views from a Dutch hill, like race.
However, we observed that the two teams starting in front of us were both quite slow (sorry two team in front of us). So before we started Hannah was already getting pumped to overtake these two teams (which would mean we had to run 4 minutes faster than the first team). Sadly enough, this meant that we had to change race tactics a bit, and we ended up dropping our fifth team member fairly early on in the race...(woops)
Hannah showed that she was strong on the hills. Running up the St Pieter she managed to take the lead with Ramon and Carmen trailing behind her. After running up the hill and having caught our breaths, our team slowly started accelerating through the bendy, gently sloping, almost cross country like trails. When we got to the point where we had to 'descend' the St Pietersberg, we even managed to accelerate even more and actually overtook a team on the way down! We sustained this newly found fast pace when we arrived at the bottom of the hill till just behind the finish line. Here we saw the second team which we overtook with a fast sprint! Just before the finish line.
We ended up going home with a nice second place, which we thought was more than okay as we technically had a mixed team!