30th March: Bynea Early Season Road Race, round 1

This didn't go well.

I had that increasingly rare thing, a free Sunday, with Claire away on a hen do. I had a weekend of big mileage planned, until the week before when Krzystof talked me into entering this. To be fair I didn't take a lot of convincing - I'd quite enjoyed my first road race and this looked interesting. It was a chance to revisit the roads of Carmarthenshire which is used to ride in my days living in Swansea, on a tough little hilly circuit that should suit the both of us. Turned out it didn't suit me too well at all.

We arrived nice and early on a perfect spring race day under blue skies, with time for two warm up/ reconnaisance laps of the 7 mile circuit. It was an absolute roller coaster; no big climbs but lots of short, sharp efforts, and hardly a section of flat road the whole way round. We rolled down to the start, only to be told there was a ten minute delay while some cows crossed the road! Fortunately there was no evidence of them crapping on the road when the race got under way, although a bit of cowshit was going to be the least of my problems.

All the waiting around meant starting with completely cold muscles and lungs. The same problem for everyone of course, but something I've found I really struggle with. Sure enough within the first few hundred (draggy uphill) metres of the race, that familiar burning feeling arose in my lungs, along with the taste of blood. I had also started right near the back, which even this road race novice knows is a bad place to be: it's the same as heavy traffic on the motorway, with any minor change in pace up the front resulting in a concertina effect that translates into heavy braking and sprinting up to speed again for those at the back. Combined with the relentlessly up and down nature of the course this meant I spent the first three quarters of lap one desperately hanging on to the back of the pack, or worse, teaming up with other stragglers to bridge back on.

Hanging out at the back, keeping the following car company. Photo by Wayne Reneke

For the final third of the lap the road went a bit more relentlessly uphill - this suited me more as the pace was fractionally lower and, more importantly, a lot more consistent. Just as I was settling down and trying to move up the pack a little - BANG. A crash right in the middle of the bunch took a dozen or so guys down. I dropped to walking pace to weave round the chaos, and watched the rest of the bunch who had avoided the crash accelerate up the road. I looked behind me, thinking there would be enough of us to get organised and ride serenely back across the gap. There wasn't; there was a handful of guys all frantically sprinting to get back in the race. I spent the next lap watching the gap to the bunch get bigger and bigger, to the point where I admitted defeat and sat up.

I rolled round for another lap (the sun was out, after all) and then pulled in with three laps still to race and lots of time to reflect on what had gone wrong. I put it down to one part not enough strength in the legs, one part poor racecraft.