It’s four weeks until the ‘cross season so it’s time to test out my kit and my legs…
The London Cyclocross Summer Series is already on round five of six, so with four weeks to go before everything gets serious I travelled up to Bethlem to remind myself how everything works. After horrendously mistiming my escape from central London I left the commuters on the packed train which I apparently wasn’t supposed to be on.
One practise lap was enough to see that it was going to be a fast one so I dropped my tyre pressure slightly for the techy bits and gridded up. The first few turns were fairly elbowy, but going into the woods for the first time saw me around the outside of a good pile of riders and in the lead group of about fifteen. The pace had slightly slackened at the end of the first lap and I was feeling pretty comfortable.
Three laps in or so I was working well with the usual suspects – Dougie Fox was going well, as was Russ Jones before he punctured. There were a worryingly large amount of Juniors in the top positions, but we were slowly making our way back past them after their ambitious starts.
In the last few laps I felt fairly strong still – I’ve still got to work on my power though as I was losing out, as always, on the flatter fast sections. The major place I was losing time was on the hurdles and in no place was this more evident than on the last lap. I had Paul Sheers in my sights pretty much every lap coming into the last section, but after a log and two hurdles he’d pulled out a ten second gap on me each time.
I rolled over the line happily enough taking 9th place in the Senior race.