The first cut is the deepest...

Cutmill 3rds, 12th Sept. I’ll begin with the excuses (so you can guess where this is going).

Body condition: sub-optimal. Tired. Extremely tired, due to a stomach bug during the week, a busy project at work and the usual inability to sleep well the night before a race.

Diet: poor. Biscuits formed a large part of the daily feeding routine. Gin and tonic made a reappearance during the week. I was going to say an unwelcome reappearance, but who would I be kidding?

Race shape: middling. Lack of time resulting in inefficient (i.e. minimal) training. All riding done at that level of either “not hard enough” or “not easy enough”. Body neither trained well nor recovered. Mental state: flabby.

Bike condition: clean, but irritating creaking BB under heavy load and wheels (Mavic Cosmic Carbone) needing spoke adjustment. Too much flex, slight rubbing on brake blocks at high speed. Issues not mechanically serious, but enough to provide irritating noises that act as a continual irritant during a 50 mile race.

Circuit: Cutmill. Never ridden it before, heard it’s pretty tough.

I got dropped, about halfway through. Not on the main climb, and not on the short ‘power’ climb after the sharp left past the long descent of The Sands. No, I waited to get dropped on the flat part of the course with a tailwind. God knows what was going through my mind to switch off there, but switch off I did and instantly regretted it. An AD Cycles guy and I were hurtling along at about 50kph but dangling just out of reach of the back of the bunch. I knew if we didn’t get back on before the left hander into the hill we would be done for. We didn’t quite make it, the service car and the ambulance came past us and we were out. Annoyingly we could still see the bunch about 20 bike lengths ahead as we went up the hill and, as they slowed, I tried to get round the ambulance in a final attempt to get back on, only to be faced with a car flying down the hill the other way. I had to pull back behind the ambulance and come to an almost complete stop to avoid being squashed and the loss of momentum meant I’d had it.

Head down, motivation lost. Do I chuck it all in or carry on? Sod it, I’ll carry on. I continued with the AD Cycles guy for company for the rest of the course, finishing stone-cold last. Plenty of riders DNF’d but there was no way I was going to give up, not again.

JamesM won for Dynamo by getting a gap up the hill on the penultimate lap and making it stick – a great solo effort. Most other Dynamos did well, finishing in the bunch, one other in the top ten. That’s a good result on a very tough course.

I hated Cutmill as a circuit though, not for the hills, but because of the narrow potholed lanes and the high numbers of cars. It’s a really fast circuit in places and it can be quite terrifying hurtling downhill in the bunch at 75kph with cars parked on one side and cars approaching the other way as well. Add into the mix the unpredictability of many riders and it turns into the type of place I’d rate low down in the list of enjoyable experiences!