An xmas of being ill and lazy had taken its toll... I'd put quite a lot of effort into training through January but it was largely undoing the damage from December's lurgy and Xmas's lethargy... By the middle of the week before the race I was feeling pretty quick again, but knew I wasn't quite where I had been in Nov/Dec.
The ground was frozen solid when I arrived but the forecast was for it to warm up as the morning went on. I was well wrapped up for the pre-ride, but I decided to leave the buff and jacket in the car and change my longs for shorts and my winter boots for normal SPDs for the race.
I was gridded again and got off to a reasonable start, someone fell in front of me on the first corner but I managed to avoid him without hitting anyone else. The course had a lot of fire-road (normally a weakness of mine) but the hours of looping around Alton Water appeared to have paid off as I was able to keep my place along it. There was a small queue at the first single-track section but mostly lap 1 flowed well. At the end of lap 1 another rider fell in front of me, he clipped the bike in front and went down, fortunately I was able to avoid him (checking he was OK) and carry on.
Lap 2 flowed better and I was still feeling pretty strong, but by lap 3 my legs were starting to fade a little. This wasn't helped by drive-train issues! While prepping the bike on Saturday I'd spotted a jockey wheel that was close to wearing away completely and had swapped it for a spare, but on my last few rides and even on the morning's pre-ride there had been no other problems. However... Once or twice during the early laps, if I tried to put the power down in a smaller cassette ring the chain would jump; as the race went on this got more and more frequent :-(
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| A jockey wheel that's seen better days |
As the ground warmed up, the course changed considerably! Bits that had been slippery to begin with had formed a dry line by the end, but the previously frozen sections became slippery and very wet.
Lap 5 felt good, but the lap times show I was actually a minute slower than lap 4... How does that work?!?!
I was aiming for a top 20 slot but ended up 21st of 87, 2hr Male Senior (missing out on 20th by 2s to someone who'd wheel-sucked me with a team mate for for most of lap 5 - mutter mutter), so not too far off.
After the first 2 rounds I was sitting in 10th place overall, so it'll be interesting to see how much damage this has done ahead of Rnd4.
I definitely noticed my singletrack handling wasn't as good as it usually is, I find AW is great for speed training, but I definitely need to spend more time in the forest getting my single-track handling back up to scratch!
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| Photo by Kevin Shaw |
