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