SERRL Lamberhurst race, 9th May 2010

“Hello, taxi please to Wimbledon. What? Seriously, not for 45-50 minutes?”

Not what you want to hear at the end of a party at 10 past midnight the night before a road race! Luckily I hadn’t drunk too much, I thought at 3:30am as I lay in bed desperately trying (and failing) to get to sleep.

“Bzzzzzzzz”.

“Urghh. What? Oh no. 06:50 already? Right, that means it’s time for muesli. Urghh. One more small cup of coffee. Right, gear, bike, bottles, out the door I go. Urghh”.

Describing the lead-up to my arrival at the beginning of my first road race in over a year (Lamberhurst 3/4, 100km) goes some way to excusing my performance. I sucked, big time. Whilst I felt at no point that I was going to get dropped from the main, reasonably pedestrian bunch, I made no attempt to get to the front, did no real work, had no problem on the hills (well, slopes) but equally didn’t make up the places I should have, and retired after 50km with a mechanical. My rear wheel started screaming on one of the descents and it sounded really terminal. My initial reaction was to stop for fear of crashing – I thought the rear axle had collapsed and my wheel was jammed against the frame. I’ve since found out that it is a common issue with Mavic freehubs and it just needs some DIY love. Doh!

The course was good – about 20km per lap, several power climbs, a couple of screaming descents, a decent road surface for the UK after the winter (i.e. loads of potholes and a crap surface but nothing too awful) and excellent marshalling, motorcade and outriding. Good stuff SERRL – very impressive organisation. They even offered some free biscuits at the end (I didn’t take any as I was in self-loathing mode).

I did have the opportunity to watch the final two laps from the comfort of the neutral service car, which was really disheartening somehow. You would see riders in ones and twos slowly going off the back of the bunch, and would start muttering to yourself “come on, come on, stay in there, dig deeper”. Depressingly they usually drifted off the back and we shot past them with a few words of encouragement. One Dulwich Paragon guy was off the back on lap 4 as we went past him in the car but put in a massive effort to get back on over the next couple of km, only to drift off the back again at the next rise – such a shame but, hey, that’s racing I guess.

Anyhow, of my two Dynamo team-mates, Mike came 8th and Mark came nowhere, despite having done loads of work on the front. Next time...

Next road race is Edenbridge in a couple of weeks. Until then more work, more train travel to Bristol, more crits, more eBay bike purchases for the kids (one bike to go) and more sleep!