More mud.
After the surprise of a dry-ish round at Brecon, normal service resumed. I'd raced here once before in 2012 and had a nightmare with a bike that clogged to a standstill with mud. After heavy rain on Saturday, the race on Sunday was always going to be messy. The drive down the M4 through some torrentially heavy showers on Sunday morning just rammed the point home.
A recce of the course proved entertaining; a real mixture of surfaces and only a couple of sections that promised deep mud. It was going to be mostly wet and slippery rather than thick, clogging mud.
My usual pre-race routine is to recce the course an hour or so before the start, then change into my race kit, have something to eat and drink, and warm up on the road for 20 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for one last look at the course and last minute faffing. As I warmed up in the rain while the youth race took place on the course (and hence churned it up), it became clear that this was one of those days when a lot of the information I'd gleaned in practice was going to be irrelevant, as I'd be faced with a much wetter and muddier course than an hour ago.
I lined up in my now customary 30th or so on the grid and got a rather lacklustre start. After a short sprint, we went more or less straight into a series of slippery switchbacks, where I seemed to be continually on the wrong line. Claire called up 32nd place after the starting loop. Ho hum. I settled down though, and picked a few people off on lap one whilst trying to re-learn the best lines on the now much muddier course. A perfect example of this was a small gravel ditch at the bottom of the course. This was rideable in practice, but a bit tricky, and I'd devoted a few minutes to making sure I could nail it. However, I never rode it once in the race, as the corner immediately prior to it was so muddy it was quicker to run, and once off the bike I may as well run through the ditch before remounting.
Claire called up 28th place at the end of lap one. Slow but steady progress made then. After a few laps things went quiet and I seemed rather on my own, first time that's happened in a race for a while, and it's hard to make sure you keep going hard when you are under no pressure, particularly in tricky conditions. I tried to press on though, while staying focussed and not making any mistakes in the increasingly slippery corners. I found the limit of adhesion a couple of times as my tyres slid sideways, but I always stayed upright.
In the last couple of laps I caught one rider but also came under pressure from behind, and had a good last lap tussle with one rider, right to the line. The lap ended with a series of wide but muddy corners, then a dismount for a set of planks and a short sprint to the line. I held onto the cleanest line through the muddy corners, got to the planks first, jumped back on and managed to do just enough to cross the line ahead. At the time of writing I don't know where I came overall; the judges are probably still trying to work it out having spent the afternoon trying to read increasingly muddy numbers on peoples' backs. They had a difficult job to do today.
It's three weeks until my next race now. I'm looking forward to the break. It will give me a chance to take a week off from training, and give the bike some much needed TLC. Oh, and clean the inside of the car, which looks like someone's been mud wrestling in it.
