While my Antipodean team-mates are tearing it up in the Croc Trophy and heading towards summer, the nights in London are drawing in. It is definitely time to stop racing, unless you are one of those strange people who likes racing a barely modified road bike around a muddy field all winter. More of that in a minute.
Normally by this time in the season, I’m weary in mind and body from six months of racing up to 10 times a month. However, that broken collarbone in the Absa Cape Epic in March, and then an extended holiday over the summer, have meant that this year has been distinctly light on races, and indeed on fitness. I got home from the States at the beginning of September with an appetite to ride some of those events that I have never quite got around to. Happily, this has coincided with a pretty spectacular Indian summer in the UK.
Hill climbs
I believe these to be fairly peculiar to the UK, as a way of rounding off the road racing season. Come October, various UK riders are to be found removing bottle cages from their road bikes, donning skinsuits and putting their cycling caps on backwards before hurling themselves up whatever cliff-like slopes local race organisers can find. I’ve been meaning to race the Cat and Bec hill climbs for a couple of years, but have never quite got round to it. The Catford CC event is the oldest continuous cycle event in the world, apparently, and the Bec CC one is also fairly ancient. Both are only 70o yards long, at a gradient which reaches 25%.
Both have a great atmosphere, with people standing three, four, five-deep on the steep stretches and screaming encouragement (I think!) in your face. Sadly for me, at only a little over two minutes, they are about 58 minutes too short for me to be any good, so my performances were unremarkable. Fun though.
One brief video taken by my team-mates, and a rather more pro job, complete with melodramatic music, and a brief appearance from yours truly at 1:10. It actually gives a decent idea what the race is like, and includes some truly superlative gurning from all concerned.
Ritchey Oktoberfest
At eight hours, this event was a bit more to my liking. Ashton Court, Bristol, was home to 6 miles of singletrack, 900 MTBers, some oompah music and a spot of Teutonic hoppery.
The video hopefully gives an idea of the course – lots of fun, lots of singletrack, a bit tricky to do much in the way of overtaking, and also a lot of hard work on the back and shoulders after four hours riding rollers and berms.
My best result of an otherwise unremarkable season, I nabbed 4th place when I unexpectedly caught the bloke ahead of me on the penultimate section of singletrack, before attacking and dropping him on the final hill.
Club road championships
This was the first time I’ve ridden this event. As a big club, we produced a field of 80 blokes, 15 girls and even a full field of juniors, racing round Hillingdon Cycle Circuit in west London.
I’ll forever claim that I nearly won. In reality it was probably a fairly long way off, but a painful five-lap break came to an end when I got swamped by the field only 200 metres from the finish line.
Rapha Supercross
Back to that strange habit, cyclocross. I’ve only ever done one cross race before, and that was inthe dark and involved Halloween costumes, racing through a beer tent, and I rode it on my singlespeed MTB.
So doing my first ever ‘proper’ cross race, riding a cross bike for the first time, was an adventure. This was at Alexandra Palace in north London, with a course that was basically all one big climb and descent. It would have been fine had it not been for riding over a small concrete lip like I would on a mountain bike and promptly pinch flatting the front wheel. Cue a longish run to find a new wheel, and riding the remainder of the race with people in the top 10, but unfortunately a lap behind them. At least I got to learn how to do a running remount. Or in my case a sort of stumbling stagger back onto the saddle.
Looking ahead
While my approach to getting fit in September was pretty unscientific – ride hard, ride a lot and see what happens – I’ve now got pretty much exactly five months to get properly fit for the next big target on the horizon – the Absa Cape Epic 2012. A certain amount of unfinished business there for sure.