Marina Duvnjak

Hi

So, I am sitting at the Philly Airport waiting to fly to our next race!! Nature Valley! Because I was a late arrival to the team I am flying alone this time and will meet the team there! Now I know I am supposed to be a grown up here, but the thought of driving to the airport this morning in the rental car was still pretty nervewrecking. This is a big place and sooooo many signs/east/west.blah blah… but I am pleased to announce I am here alive and well….. I did however manage to get here 3.5 hrs early and now am sitting on the ground typing away trying to amuse myself till the battery dies….

I thought I could get away with eating my ready made lunch/wrap type thing with out dripping it all over myself….. but how wrong was I…. maybe I could kill another 15min trying to clean the sauce off the white t-shirt…. hmmmm……As someone would say….. Messy pup!!

So yeah, Kutztown was pretty cool!! Its about a 30 min ride to trexlertwon where the summer track season goes off!! I was here in 2001 for 3 months and have some great memories of the place…. Met some cool people!! Anyway, so I actually enjoyed sleeping out in the motor home, was like my own little hideaway! The team left this morning at 4.30am, while I was like hehehhe suckers you have to get up so early!! Once they left about an hour later the thunder and rain came down…. so needless to say the fear of getting struck by lightning was back and I got up soon after….

Philly was a pretty wicked race!! First of all there would have been at least 15 Kiwis taking part in the race (men and women)…. so it’s a great time to catch up!! Our goal for the day was to get my team mate Ruth into the QOM jersey…. and that we did!! It was a hotly contested competition,. But we managed to pull it off!! (for a more detailed race reports and photos please check out www.jazzapplecycling.com) I love it when the plan works to a T!!!

The other major highlight was the womens peleton, PASSING the men, about 3 laps into the race!!! bahahhah…. shame!! There were a few words exchanged on the way!!! Dont think I should write them on here, but basically the men got hassled big time!! ha!! If you think about it some of those guys get paid more than the yearly budget for a womens team!!!

Anyhow! My battery’s about to die, only 2.5 hrs to go…….. ohhhhh!!!

Back soon!!

Bye

Hey there

So as promised here is the update….

Righto, so as you might have realized I have joined the Jazz Apple cycling team! It was a bit of an unexpected event, but it has turned out great!! The original plan for the year was to take it as it comes and up until like 7 weeks ago I was going on a trip to the US to visit Mike, a couple of emails to Susy asking if I was able to join them for a few races…. etc… And things just went on from there!!

I arrived in Monterey California last Saturday, greeted by the team manager Chris Drake! It’s been 9 days now and I have managed to:

Shift houses/accomodation :5 times (absolutely amazing team host housing, a MASSIVE change from my last year in Europe thats for sure!! People are so nice and friendly here too!! Actually smile and are excited to have us here!!

Race : 4 times ( 4x 60min crits)

Plane trips :4 Right now we are flying to Philly for a major event on the 7^th June

Tangled up in crash (but not go down by some miracle) :1 amazing that a bunch of girls can corner at like 45km/hr but take each other out on a straight bit of wide road, right past the start finish line!! I had nowhere to go and piled straight into a girl already on the ground, but somehow I didnt go down, all I know is that I was sliding along, on my cleats totally upright and using every bit of my inner thigh strenght not to end up on the gound doing the splits!! So I just gradually slowed down and just tipped over, managing to hold myself up with one finger!! hahah I looked round for my bike and realised it was like 5 meters back!! I had to crack up, no idea how I managed that one, but the only proof I have is a tiny scratch on my ankle!! waaaahhh!!

Number of kiwis spotted at races so far : 3, Huck, Toni, Jas!! 4 with Liz! More kiwis to be spotted this weekend in Philly!!

Promotianl work for Jazz Apple ; 1 at Wholefoods! Pretty good fun!!b basically just spend a bit of time in the shop talking about and promoting the apple..

Witnessed a demolished team bike!!: 1 Malindi had a bad spil on the first night of racing and the bike was totally stuffed! Forks completely snapped, and considering state of the bike she’s come of pretty good!

Anyway, it’s only been like 4 races (crits) so far, but man its been soooooo much fun!! The crowds and the atmosphere here are totally different to Europe!! people are loving the fact that there is a race on, and the mens and womens races are on the same time so thats wicked too!!

Gotta, go… be back soon! Kutztown here we come!

Over

Hey

Righto, have fun people, back soon!
Over

Kia Ora!!

So today is the last stage! The shortest of the tour!74.8km.  Again flat as a pancake! The biggest obstacle again is the wind!  Basically the race was pretty uneventful!! Probably because at this stage it seemed like that the Germans, the Italians and the Ozzie team joined forces!! Not saying that this is exactly what happened but it seemed that way, and  of course the Chinese had their 18man/woman team going on! There were a few attacks by the South Africans and Chinese again and a a few from us, but it was pretty obvious it was going to be another bunch sprint! Lucky Brei and Karen had their shit organized and we picked up a 3 sec bonus on the last sprint which brought karen up  on GC. So basically heading toward the finish the most exciting/scariest part was when an Italian decided to drop her bottle right in the middle of the bunch, looked like it was on purpose too, rather the biffing it into the bushes she just dropped it. Then this Giant Aisa chick (although I’m not fully convinced shes a full on girl, shes HUUUGE) she/he picked her bottle up and threw it at the Italian, and then another one went flying, this is like 3 km from the finish and these two biatches are having  freaking water fight! So there was the finish and Karen did a wicked job of placing 5th prob only like 4cm separating her from 3rd spot!! We put in a protest about the 2 dummies biffing bottles but there was nothing done about it. If they were relegated Karen could have potentially moved up even more on GC and our team clasification too, which in turn meant more money!
Anyway we walked away with a bit of prize money for once and a great experience, maybe with a bit more time riding as  a team we would have been sussed out earlier and done even better but hey, next time!?
Jorge, JD and Justin you guys did an awesome job  thank you for looking after us and giving us this awesome opportunity!  Greatly appreciated!!
Home time!
See ya!

Hey!!

Anyway off to bed, 1 more day! yay!
Over

 As I sit and write this its the first 2 min noodles I’ve had since we arrived here, and they are pretty yummy!! (useless bit of info)

So, I’ve had my first race 3 days ago now!  The Individual TT, 20km, flat as, but pretty windy, side wind 90%of the way.

So in the past the Chinese girls have been dominating taking pretty much 17 out of the top 20 places.  This year was rather different. TT specialists came over especially for the event and it showed.  I was 7^th to go and that was pretty good as the wind picked up slightly as the day went on!! I had my standard bike and Mikes Reynolds which are faaaast!!  Little things like aero helmet, and clip on bars too so it was great to at least try and be aero!!  Anyhow I managed a top 10 placing!!  I gotta admit I was pretty happy with that, John our mechanic recons I was the fastest person on a non TT bike/setup, so that’s great!!  Freaking hard and I gave it shit and glad I actually got a great result! Probably could have made top 6 if I had a disc??!!

Yesterday was our first stage of the actual tour!  It was 16 laps of a 4.9km circuit, on the 10m “wild” roads!!  We have nor ridden together before as a team, and although we had great intentions and plans it didn’t quite work out, the race was a lot slower then I was expecting.  We still managed a 10^th with Karen and Naila not far behind.  We didn’t get quite organized early enough and just got boxed in trying to come up on the left! Stink one ou!!

Today we had another plan set! Be aggressive and fang it from the start! Taking turns from the gun, we were hoping to spread the field out a little, but they were not letting anything go,  Plans got changed on the road and we ended up doing a lot more then we originally planned, attacking countering etc, and although it made racing waaaay more interesting, in the end we were again not quite able to pull off the original plan or leading Karen out, so she did a brilliant job of getting  5^th!! Yay!!  So even though we had a great run in the race, the end result for the team classification suffered! We slipped from 6^th to 10^th!! Oops!! Needless to say tomorrow we are gonna ride the race for the sprints (time bonuses) and save ourselves for the finish!! Fuck it!! Let the others try break it up.  2 more stages to go!! Tomorrow we have a 120km and what it looks like from the map, we have something like 32km of straight road, then a little circuit then we come back along the same road!! Nice!!

That’s it for now, another update tomorrow!

Ni Hau!! Welcome to China… Part 1!  (update delayed about 11 days)

Well what do you know!! I have now been in China for 3 days and live to tell the story!! It took a 30 min car drive to airport, 2.5hr wait for the flight, 12 hr flight, 1hr wait, 2hr flight, 1hr wait at airport for 1 lost bag, 1.5hrs bus drive, 30 min wait for the 12.30am ferry, 2 hour ferry to Chongming Island from Shanghai, and last but not least a 2 min drive off the boat to the hotel!! Think it was 2.30am by the time out heads hit the pillows!! Sheesh…..
I’m rooming with Brei!! She’s pretty cool, we’ve been roomies a number of times now and pretty much know how the other functions!! She’s still trying to catch up on my dance moves tho, so we crank up the I-Tunes on her computer and Naila’s $16 speaks she bought the other day, and we have our own little dance party going on!! When you spend most of the day trying to avoid the pollution and the smog there is no other option but to amuse ourselves indoors!!
6am I woke up to constant tooting and honking, still pretty loud up on the 17^{th floor!! Was not amused to say the least, I looked over at Brei, and she was still passed out big time!}

Anyway…..I must admit it was a bit of a shock once we dragged our butts out of bed on the first morning and opened the curtains!! Firstly all I could see was the fog, thick dirty fog… You can barely see 400m into the distance and there is no way you could see the sun, you know its there somewhere because its kinda bright out there, its just thick cloud/fog/shit air really!!
Back to the honking, well I thought it was just a couple of locals having a go at each other for being really really shit drivers, but I see now that EVERYONE here drives with the horn on the WHOLE time, I look outside my window and there is rather big intersection there, there is a zebra crossing and lights, on every street….. But I tell ya what, that don’t mean a thing in this place. There’s scooters, pedestrians, trucks, bikes, tuk tuks, busses, taxis, anything you can imagine going for it, its a toot, and you go, toot and go, toot go, toooooooot yell GO!! You get the picture right!! Not trying to be mean but I can totally see now why they might not be the best drivers in NZ, I can’t even describe it really…. Busses cars overtaking on the wrong side of the road, barely missing oncoming traffic…. Oh its just insane. The amazing thing is I haven’t seen an accident yet, the only one was a lady crashing off the scooter as she was staring at us walking to the supermarket, its obvious we are tourists (round eyes)…..
Ok next subject… Food… Where do I begin.. I really don’t know where to start, so lets go with the breakfast … First morning on offer we had things like fried rice, noodles, eggs, something that looked like eggs but was jelly black and green, other things that I can’t even remember now, they don’t have any type of cereal, just white bread and jam…. Random. For dinner we were set on the Pizza place round the corer from the hotel only to find it shut, so walking pass the food stalls on the sidewalk we found a place with pictures so thinking that would be the easy option we went inside, and with some pointing and nodding we somehow ended up upstairs, via the kitchen (where there were live chicken hanging out, fish and crayfish, crabs…) anyhow we ended up in a private room upstairs with a “menu with some pics” On offer we had… OX penis, Pigeon Soup, Dog hot pot, Chicken Giblets……Sooooo we opted for white rice, noodles, cooked green vege looking things and couple of spring rolls… The lady thought we were slightly odd for not ordering any meat or fresh salad but hey… Better to be, safe then sorry… Anyway besides that so far there have been no casualties….
The hotel has now provided us with all three meals for the day, and those can be very interesting too:
White fungus broth, Regetable Soup (also known as Vegetable soup), Beef stewed in Toma to (tomato) paste , Turtle Soup , Rabbit legs just to name a few!! The Chinese culture is very different I will not deny that, but I feel sometimes that showing my disbelief at what they eat I might be offending them, they seem so proud to have us there, I try not to, but sometimes its just an immediate reaction once I’ve read the English version….
Reading through the race booklet it explains the condition of the roads we are racing on, for the TT the roads are “10 - mete - wild”. Another sign as we exit the list says “Warm Chongratulations on the tour of Chongming Island”. Soo cute! They are rather proud of their event and have been very welcoming to us!! Cheers guys!!

^{Righto thats all for now folks!! Catch ya laters!}

^Over

Hey

So I’m still alive! Man I say that every time

Anyhow, track nationals are well over with and I am please to say I have walked away from them with my first senior medal! A bronze in the the womens team pursuit, mainly due to my bloody awesome team mates !! You guys rock!!

So since then things have been going great!! I managed to win the Auckland Crit champs for the second time! Yay! And finally after years about people bragging about it I finally did the tour of Northland!! Man that was a cool experience!! I felt soooo good and rode so well the whole weekend I was on a buzz!! Wicked training!! And a bonus I got the first female overall!! Thanks to all the people that looked after me felt pretty spoilt!!

On Monday I’m off to China to race in the tour of Chongming Island! Jorge Sandoval is taking a group of NZ chicks over and we’re racing in a 20km ITT on the 17^th April then a 4 day tour 18-21April!! Apprenlty its all flat and fast so its gonna be interesting! I’ve never been to China so its something new and exciting!! Will keep you posted how its going!!

Mike left last night to join his team Landrover-Orbea , Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!! miss him already!!

Righto I’m off hope everyone’s great!! Write to me!!!

Over

Hey

Anyway, nothing else to report, so wish me luck and let ya know what happens after..
over…