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Apart from last weeks road race, I havn’t had a proper race for 7 weeks (Cyprus). Ok you could say sherwood, but after pulling out on lap 2 it’s hardly a race worth bragging about, so with having no pain in my groin in the week leading up to the British mountain bike series round 2, I was happy to start my British Mountain Bike season without any worries. We (usual Williams lot) decided that we would start our trip to Dalby Forrest (Yorkshire) on the Friday and cover half the traveling, stay over night then travel the remainder of the journey the following day, as we thought this might save us from getting up early on the Saturday morning for a long haul trip in time for a few practise laps, which I think worked out pretty good.

After a good nights sleep, we arrived at the race venue on Saturday around 11:30am where I done a few practise laps of the course to make sure I had the right tyres and pressures, choosing my lines wasn’t so much of a big deal as the course hadn’t changed for the last 3 or 4 times I’ve raced there so my lines stayed pretty much the same. Unlike last season where we decided to camp on site, we thought we’d take the luxury of booking into a hotel in Scarborough where we could have a hot meal cooked for us and a warm dry bed the night before the race. Oh….and eat ice-cream on the sea front, you know, how all the pro’s do it! :)

The morning of the race I was in good spirit and my plan for the race was to go hard! I knew that with the strong international field again for round 2, including a world cup winner (Geoff Kabush – Can) it was a chance to race the boys that I know I can race on home soil! Gridded on the 2nd row of the grid, I knew that I would have to pull out a good start, as with Dalby if you enter the first singletrack with the fast boys on the front with a couple of riders between then its easy for gaps to appear and you end up starting the race already trying to close gaps.

Unfortunately for me that’s exactly what happened, entering the singletrack in about 10th, so every time a gap appeared I was sprinting to try and get myself back up to the leaders and back in the mix. By half way round the first lap I was into the top 5 with the contenders in a small group in front. For the next 2 laps I chased hard and nearly made contact with Geoff Kabush who was slightly falling off the pace of the front 3 leading riders containing Oli Beck (uk), Maxime Marotte (Fra) and Ole-Christian Fagerli (Nor), but unfortunatley by the end of the 3rd lap this is where my trouble was to start…

Entering the arena (about to start the 4th lap) I slid out on some gravel and collided with a wooden post taking a bit of a thump, I got back on but my shifter had broke in the crash leaving me with no big ring. I tried from that point on to push hard on the climbs as they were one of the only places on the course I could get a comfortable gear but with the many extremely fast cadence sections now added to my race by the last lap I was starting to cramp and go backwards fast. I crossed the line being push out of a top 5 finish by the Portuguese National champ who at one point was around a minute and half down on me. Overall I felt my legs were reasonable and with me heading out to South Africa for the 1st round of the World Cup next week I feel I can improve my speed from this weeks race and have a good chance of achieving my target result of a top 50 finish.

To keep up to date with my South Africa trip you can follow me @xcwilliams on twitter. Also updates will be added to my new website xcwilliams.com

Results, Report, Pics’s & Vid’s
http://www.britishcycling.org.uk/mtb/article/mtb20110417–MTB–Kabush–Bresset-win-British-XC-0