English
Over the last few weeks I’ve continued to build my training ready for the mountain bike season which for me will start a lot earlier this year as I’ll be heading to Cyprus at the end of February. I’ll be doing 3 UCI races to gain some extra points ready for the the start of the World Cup season. Normally the season starts around the end of March – April, so this will be quite strange as even though I’ll be racing early in the season, I’ll still be putting in some big mileage before the bulk of racing kicks off fully.
However, with training progressing well, I had a short term goal to get wound up over first and that was….putting in a quality ride at the National Cyclocross Championships before I could fully excited for the fast approaching mountain bike season. After a pretty disappointing National Trophy Cross season it left me missing out on a few ranking points which I needed for the gridding at the champs. When it came to the gridding I was hoping that I would have been on the second row, but I actually ended up being on the fourth row which was by no means the ideal position to start from, as the start straight was quite short and narrow.
This for me was a bit of a shame as my starts in all the trophies have been very strong when there’s space to move up, but I knew this would be one big scrap to the first turn and onto the course. The course itself was very fast, with a mix of twisting bends through parkland and a few tarmac sections to really stretch it out which would really suit my new Zipp 303 wheels.
Off the start I got boxed in and had to watch riders pass me on the outside until we got onto the course where I was able to move up through the field. However, I wanted to be up with the leaders in the first half lap as I knew they would soon start to make distance between the rest of the field. Unlucky for me I was sitting in about 27th with a big long line of riders all in single file averaging about 25mph, which made it really hard to move up, and by the end of the first lap 6 riders had already broke away from the main bunch and a podium was already slipping away.
I managed to pass riders and get myself up to 7th, but the gap to try and get with the leaders was to much and they were all taking turns at upping the pace at the front leaving it extremely hard to close the gap. For the rest of the race I continued to push hard, ending up finishing just over a minute down on the winner in 7th position. This was quite disappointing for me as I was in pretty good shape coming into this race and I felt that if I’d have been able to get to the front earlier in the race before the lead bunch got away, then I would have been part of the break and had a great chance of winning. Never the less I didn’t……so that’s tough, and that’s just how the racing goes sometimes, even though it can be a bit frustrating at times.
I can now look forward to the mountain bike season where I’m going to get an absolute corker of a Focus bike to race and hopefully get another chance to try and win a National title, this time on an MTB.
Race Report
www.new.britishcycling.org.uk/cyclocross/article/National-Cyclo-Cross-Championships—Day-2-0
Video