British Road Race Championships

Last weekend saw the national road race championships taking place in north Yorkshire at Ampleforth. This was my first senior National Championships and I knew it would be a hard race with all the top domestic teams racing as well as Team Sky. The course was hard with three laps of a 20mile loop followed by six laps of a 10mile circuit to total 115 miles of rolling roads and challenging climbs. I lined up for the start with fellow Academy cyclists ready for a long day on the bike. The pace was hard straight away with people attacking everywhere to try and get in the early break, I tried to keep myself near the front out of trouble as the roads were narrow and rough which would make it easy for the race to split to pieces. Then after a couple of laps of the big circuit Endura Racing got on the front and the pace went up greatly as they began to bring back the break so I kept good position to avoid splits on the climbs and the damage behind. Then as we came into the smaller circuits for six laps there was a main climb which was causing a lot of damage and the group gradually got smaller. There was still a break of three away with over 5min including two Sky riders so our group was turning into a race for the under 23 race which was still available. I kept myself involved all the way until the second last time up this climb where the group was about 25 and it split into three group as the attacks started coming thick and fast, I found myself on the back foot here and was unable to follow and get involved so ended up in the third group of 5 until I got to 10miles to go and I had nothing left so it was a lonely ride to the finish for me but happy to have made it crossing the line in 31^st place after a long hard 5hour race. More races coming up over the next couple of weeks will try keep you posted.

Cheers for reading. Grant

 

Nove Mesto/La Bresse World Cups.

It has been a busy couple of weeks with plenty of different races going on. First of I had the third round of the World Cup series in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic. It was a good course with lots of short hard climbs and rooty technical sections. The race here did not go well for me, I had a good start and came round the start loop in the top 10 but then unfortunatly went backwards through the race, I couldn't really explain what was up with my performance because I went into the race fit and healthy but I just couldnt respond during the race when people came past me and ended up finishing well down in 65th.

A week later I headed to La Bresse in France for the forth round of the World Cup series. The course here was a different ball game with one major climb to the top of a hill followed by a fast old school decent back to the bottem. I started a bit slower this time and came through safely after the start loop in 28th then tried to work my way through the field, by the 4th lap I had got to 18th but then drifted back in the last lap and finished in 25th which I was quite pleased with after the previous result the week before.

photo thanks to Rockyroads.net

Thanks Grant