After a two-week break from racing, normality (or dysfunctionality, depending on your views on shopping and telly vs bikes and mud every weekend) was well and truly restored this weekend. Before my race on Sunday, Saturday was a trip up to Builth Wells to help Claire out competing in a cross country (running) race: I had the relatively easy supporting jobs of clapping a bit and trying my best to help Claire get warm and dry again afterwards; she arguably got the harsh end of the bargain with a shift in the pits on Sunday, cleaning and swapping bikes for me.
Mountain View Ranch was a new course last year and a total mudfest; after a few very wet weeks of weather, this year promised to be no different. To make the most of home advantage I nipped up in the week and rode the course; it was a similar layout to last year and sure enough very wet. The next morning I hear from the organisers that they had decided it was too wet and have come up with a completely different layout! So I made time for another quick ride up the hill on Saturday morning to have a look. Even speaking as someone who relishes slogging through deep mud, it was a change for the better with more of a mixture of surfaces and also a few more interesting features: more climbing and descending, and a couple of fairly technical bits to contend with on the way down the hill. Still lots of mud too though.
After a long day in the car on Saturday, the luxury of racing a ten-minute drive from home was most welcome: no early alarm clocks and time for a leisurely breakfast before leaving the house. Knowing this was going to be a muddy one, I got a couple of wet and muddy practice laps done in plenty of time to clean the bike and put on clean dry kit, then headed off to warm up on the road.
The start was a 100 metre charge over grass and straight into some of the heaviest going on the course. The thing that sticks in my mind from the first few seconds of the race is sensation of cold, wet, muddy water hitting me from every angle. After that you're not really getting any wetter and you barely notice it.
I got a decent getaway, but picked the wrong lines in the first few mud sections - always a bit of a lottery - and slipped back a bit. Not the end of the world in these conditions, and I settled to the task of methodically picking people off ahead of me. Soon I was catching up with Mike, another AJAX rider who had made a good start. This is Mike's first full season of cyclocross and he has got better and better as the season has progressed - I think I may be seeing him ahead of me quite a lot of the time next year. Mike and I settled into a group of four that spent the middle part of the race pushing each other hard, with nothing more than a few seconds between us at any point. Great racing.
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| Some course-side mascots. Photo by Clare Dallimore |
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| The stream crossing: how not to ride it. Photo by Behnaz Dye |
By the middle of the race the course was a total mess; sections that had been rideable earlier in the day were now to cut up to the point where they were, at best, a choice between whether it was quicker to run or try and ride. A particular highlight near the end of the lap was ploughing through a stream crossing with a dead turn afterwards followed by a small rise. By mid race, water dragged along the course by the passage of wheels had turned this into a somewhat longer puddle followed by 20 metres of uphill through rim-deep slop. Busy with the challenges of looking for clean (figure of speech!) lines and sheer pain management, at some point I realised that the three other riders I had been racing were nowhere to be seen. Where did everybody go?! I had no idea whether they were now ahead of me or behind me! Glancing back on open stretches of the course, I caught glimpses of Mike and one other rider behind me, but I couldn't see anyone ahead of me, so it was just a case of keeping a gap, plugging on and praying for the sound of the bell.
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| Giving the commissaires my "Please ring the bell now" look. Photo by Clare Dallimore |
I was taking bike changes every two to three laps (thank you to the long-suffering Claire and the ever-helpful Doug in the pits), and as I took a clean bike with two laps to go, I soon realised something wasn't right with the drivetrain. As I rode downhill to the bottom the course, I could feel the chain slacken and tighten again before being dumped off the front chainring altogether. I stopped to put the chain back on, normally a job that just takes a few seconds, but as soon as I spun the pedals, it was dumped back off again. Try again and this time it stayed put, but I got going again only in time to see Mike catch up and overtake me! The silver lining to this cloud was seeing the leaders come past at the same time, putting me a lap down but making this my final lap. Not knowing whether my chain could be trusted anymore, I ran the entire of the climb up the course - luckily for me this was now so cut up that there was nothing to choose between running and riding this. As I remounted at the top I managed to pass Mike and get a gap of a few seconds, and mercifully the chain stayed where it should (cleaning bikes at home, the culprit revealed itself in the form of a small stone wedged up against one of the jockey wheels). I just hung on over the finish line, the two of us separated by less than a bike length. We finished 7th and 8th overall.
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