Maggie Coles-Lyster

Hello beautiful people! I have been pretty neglectful of my blog lately... so here will be my attempt to do a short recap of my year since my last blog after my crash in Copenhagen. For those of you who have read my other blogs you'll notice I'm not great at condensing content so this will be today's challenge to not write a novel (also to not use a million exclamation points... that one might be a bit far fetched)! So the last chapter ended with me in the recovery process from my broken face and prepping for my first block of road racing in California. All in all, Chico and San Dimas Stage Races went much better than I would of guessed, especially considering my February endurance block kind of fell off the track (no pun intended). Following California, I hopped on a plane back to Quebec to meet my new Macogep-Argon18-Girondins p/p Mazda teammates. Do the whole team photoshoot, sponsor dinner, become instant friends and some serious bonding on a 26hr drive down to Arka...

I can't believe it's already almost March! The past two months have blown by, but everyday has been so full and impactful that I could probably relate every single event of every single one of the past 51 days from memory. My last blog post ended with me sitting in the small air bnb in beautiful Gent, Belgium, just days out of competition. By the end of that week, I had resurrected my jump and bunch racing legs and was race ready! The first day of the Belgian International TrackMeeting consisted of a Points Race, where I rode a safe race, but needed to have more confidence in my abilities and trust that I had great form to do better than the 9th place I ended up with. That night we put together a last minute Madison pairing of Chiara Consonni (ITA) and I and we dove right into the race with our first ever exchange being on lap 2. Probably one of the sketchiest Madisons I've ever done but we got through it, not missing an exchange and finishing on the same lap as ...

...contiuned I spent the last couple weeks of September in Belgium training with another Canadian junior, Michael Foley, who went to Track Worlds and was going to Road Worlds as well and his coach, Canadian cycling hero Steve Bauer! Michael and I then country hopped up to Bergen, Norway to join team Canada. First of all, let me express how freaking beautiful Norway is! A beautiful country, very similar to the West Coast of Canada (except, believe it or not, wetter!) with an adoration for my least favourite food, salmon. In fact, the World Championship numbers even had a picture of cooked salmon on them! Maybe that was the start of my unlucky World Champs road race... So much fun training with the one and only Michael Foley in Belgium :D Erin Attwell and I exploring expensive, elaborate fur stores post race! Race day was a little hectic with one of us 4 junior girls crashing on the way over to sign on, us all getting split up, getting minimal warm up and of course, ...