Welsh Cyclocross League Round 12: Pembrey Country Park

After being cancelled earlier in the month, the ever-popular Pembrey venue was rearranged to the last round of the series. Pembrey is all sandy well-draining ground and brings a welcome reprieve from plugging through the mud in December. Always fast, and normally something of a crit on grass, this year saw a shift to a different part of the park, butting right up to the beach and featuring some proper sections of sand.

I made an early start for the drive out west, aiming to have plenty of time to ride a brand new course and, having never ridden a course with a big sand component before, find a bike setup that I was happy with. The course was indeed something completely different: a long full-throttle section of fireroad to begin the lap, then a track that meandered up and down through the sand dunes, sometimes on hard-packed sand, sometimes through loose stuff. The lap ended with a bigger hill; up a set of steps and down a sandy dune to the finish line. It promised to be fast, with the only opportunity to catch my breath coming in the 30 seconds or so it took to ride down the descent to the finish each lap (a good job, as the run up the steps was sure to put me deep into the red).

I'd driven over through some heavy showers early in the morning, but it had stayed dry for the kids' races. No such luck for the main race, as the heavens opened just as we lined up at the start line. What had already felt like a barely adequate warm up (skipping my usual intervals for one more last-minute tempo ride around the course) now felt completely inadequate as I stood damp and shivering on the start line. Like I said Pembrey is always a popular race, and had indeed attracted a strong field, with all the main Welsh League protagonists in attendance looking for one more good result. The start - almost a kilometre flat out along a gravel fire road, promised to be fast and ruthless.

GO! 0 to 25 mph over gravel, banging bars and shoulders. Love it (I think). Photo by Howard Goldberg/Behnaz Dye

I got a good getaway from the second row, but got caught up in a little more body contact than I'm comfortable with at 25 mph as everyone jostled for position, and I dropped back to about 20th place. Despite a bit of rubbing of shoulders, the long open start did a good job of stringing the field out before we hit the technical stuff. I held my own reasonably well through the dunes, and avoided any major carnage on the descent back to the finish. The laps then flew by in a familiar pattern: a two-minute time trial along the fireroad; try to stay neat and tidy through the dunes; leg it up some steps and try not to lose too much time on the descent to the finish. Whilst I was riding this descent where some were running, I certainly wasn't as fast or as confident down it as some of my competitors. This had a knock-on effect on the start of the lap; this section was fast enough to allow a bit of drafting, but inevitably began with me trying to chase down the rider or group of riders who had put a few seconds into me on the descent.

Leg it up a sand dune, try not to throw up at the top, slide down the other side. Photo by Howard Goldberg/Behnaz Dye

As I accelerated down the fireroad for the fifth time, I felt the tell-tale feeling of a rear tyre that was softer than it should be. Yep, I had a puncture (the culprit was pretty obvious when I checked the bike afterwards - a wayward safety pin from somebody's race number was sticking out of my tyre!)... My first thought was to pack it in - only a good result could improve my position in the overall standings, and I wasn't going to get one now - but pride told me to get back to the pits and continue on the spare bike.

I got most of the way down the fireroad before the tyre lost all pressure, so I only had to limp over a few hundred metres of hard ground and then the rest of the lap was sand. This proved to be pretty rideable with zero psi in my rear tyre! Unfortunately I had nobody in the pits for me today, so it took me what felt like forever to find my spare bike when I got there. Oh well, the rest of the race was really going to be just for fun and pretty meaningless now, I thought.

I did three more laps on the spare bike, trying to work as hard as I had been before. I managed to catch and pass a few people who had overtaken me as I made my way slowly back to the pits, but I wasn't taking it entirely seriously any more, exemplified by exchanging end-of-term pleasantries and/or banter with a few riders as I lapped them, and when I caught some traffic on the climb up the steps, I was quite happy to plod up behind them rather than barge past at full gas.

I finished in 29th place - I was quite pleasantly surprised not to be further down the field - which was a completely irrelevant result in terms of the overall league, but other results had gone my way, meaning I hung on to my existing position in the overall standings.

That brings us to the end of another Welsh Cyclocross League season. It's been a busy, tiring and intense few months, but it's all been a lot of fun and a great series to be part of. More friends have been made, and more (hopefully friendly!) rivalries have been forged. No cycling discipline is as friendly as cyclocross, and meeting up with the same people week in and week out makes for a great little community. The atmosphere, with races for all ages and abilities, also can't be beaten, and neither can the quality of the cakes often being sold out of a rain-lashed gazebo. I've said it before but it bears repeating: the atmosphere at a cyclocross race is a little like that of a village fete, but one where nobody is surprised or disappointed by terrible weather.

This has been another year of racing not only cyclocross for me, but also road and cross country. Despite racing a season that began on the road in late February, I'm feeling less tired than this time last year. In fact, although the main event of Welsh League is over, I'm eyeing up a few other races over Christmas, and I may well put a bike in the back of the car and head off to one more race before the end of year. Then again, I might just treat myself to a slice of normal life over Christmas and put my feet up. Or if I'm feeling energetic, have a walk down to the pub.

Welsh Cyclocross League Round 11: Mountain View Ranch, Caerphilly

I skipped round 10 because everybody did: it was cancelled due to bad weather. I know what you're thinking: it must take some pretty exceptionally bad weather to cancel a cyclocross race. Well the combination of a course situated on a stretch of coastline exposed to the full force of the Atlantic Ocean and said ocean offering up severe gales for Sunday led to, if you'll pardon the pun, the perfect storm. Cyclocrossers will put up with most things, but nobody wants to race in 70mph winds or have a tree fall over on them, and the organisers had no choice but to cancel. Suddenly faced with a free weekend, I took the rare opportunity to do what normal people do on Sundays at this time of year: Christmas shopping followed by Sunday lunch.

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.

Some course-side mascots. Photo by Clare Dallimore

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.

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.