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After a good effort in last week’s BMBS and with another reasonable week of riding done, I had one last mountain bike race left before I could knock the mountain bike season on the head for another year…
‘The Hondsrug Classic’ in Gieten, Holland. Seems a bit pointless to add one last race just for the sake of it, but with it being a Class 1 UCI race there was good points up for grabs and the chance to snag a few was too tempting…
We headed over on the Friday and crashing in our van ready for a lap of the course on the Saturday before the race the following day. Now, I know the Netherlands are notoriously flat and have fast courses but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that bad. The course consisted of long fireroads, doubletracks and at no point on the 16 mile course was there a spot you could say to yourself “I’ll recover here”… it was relentless! With it being such a large lap, it meant it was a two lap race, which was a different format to what I’m used to but still a race all the same – so no different tactics really needed… flatout all the way! Also, with the race having good points up for grabs, not to mention the rather large prize funds, it was obvious the start line would consist of a lot of top names and that the competition would be pretty hot soon as that gun fired.
Lap of the course from my Garmin
The day of the race, Gieten kicked up a 30’c scorcher of a day, but fortunately a lot of the course was under the cover of the tree’s, but I’m sure it would still have an effect towards the latter stages of the race. Gridded around the 20ish mark I was pretty happy as I knew there were another 1200+ riders lined up behind me wishing they were starting from where I was, but other than that I felt that was a decent place to be able to move up from. Down the start straight an into the first bend I moved up into the top ten, but on the next two bends a few riders (loads) dived down the inside of a bend pushing back outside the top 20. Over the next few straights there was no room to move let alone move up, but luckily a gap appeared down the inside and I shot down it as quick as I could sending me sailing to the front of the race. However with the course due to narrow in the next quarter mile everybody started thrashing it and pretty soon I once again back outside the top 20.
As the course narrowed the race split into two bunches with the front bunch containing around 15 riders and my group containing around 8 riders, it ended up the front bunch were moving slightly quicker than us and all too soon I found myself out of the race. Obviously at the time I was a bit bummed that I wasn’t in the front group, but honestly the pace was so crazy fast I cant say I paid that much attention to the front group.
It was the craziest mtb race I’ve done, with speeds exceeding your average crit race – I ended up spending nearly 2hrs riding over my threshold and doing everything in my power to just hang onto the group I was in! When crossing the line I couldn’t help but think of how horrible the race was (well horrible in that ‘I love killing myself’ sick athlete kind of way) I made a promise that I’m never going to enter that race again!
Since sleeping on it, I am going to enter it again next year as it’s left me scratching my head as to whether the race was actually that fast or was I just a little rusty on the flat courses…? Hmm…
Anyways… that’s the end of the 2011 mtb season for me and now I can concentrate on a hard winter’s training (a bit of cross racing) and aim to make a big step up next year, even more so as it’s an Olympic year!
