If anyone has been following my twitter over the past week I
said that I was going to have a race update on Monday night, but I just didn't
get around to it until now. Last weekend I raced three races over two days in
part of a small but still challenging Cairns Cycling Festival.
Saturday morning started with an individual time trial,
which was 20km, an out and back course. It was quite windy so this made it
difficult with a headwind coming home. I went out really hard sitting on about
43km/h for the first 10km. When I came to the turn around and started to head
back I felt like I just ran out of energy and hadn’t eaten for that previous
three days. This made coming back even more difficult. I ended up finishing in
3rd after the first race for the weekend. I averaged 38km/h with a
time of 32:23 for the 20km.
A criterium was followed in the afternoon and I must say
that it was really hard to back up after a hard hit out that morning. It didn't
take long before the strongest rider in Cairns, Ivan Cook attacked into the
head wind and I didn't have the legs to try and go with him. I was left with
another rider and we kept swapping off turns to try and keep going for the
40min race. Cook ended up lapping us with about 10mins to go and he put in
another attack with 2 laps to go. I wasn't able to follow this either so I just
rolled around to the finish to try and finish the race. I finished in 3rd
and was very undecided as to whether or not I would race on Sunday as I thought
I had worn myself out too much.
I decided on Sunday that I would do the race although of the
horrible wet conditions. A very small field turned up to race A grade with Ivan
once again turning up and being the main favourite to win again. There were
only 3 riders in my grade and the officials gave B grade a 5min head start, so
automatically our first goal was to try and catch them. Cook did the majority
of the work throughout the whole race but no one missed a turn. As we came
around with 10km to go, we started to head up the infamous green hill loop,
which was expected to test some riders. We could see B grade at the top of the
hill and we definitely thought we would be able to catch them. Cook attacked
but I was able to follow his move and he just sat up. We came to one kilometre
to go and we were still together with B grade around 40 seconds ahead. I was
sitting in third wheel perfect for a sprint but Cook’s aggressive and powerful
lesson meant that he was able to easily sprint for the line taking the win
followed by myself in second.
I don't think it was the best weekend of racing that I’ve
ever done and that’s due to the fact that I hadn’t been on the bike that much.
I felt a lot stronger on the bike in Sunday’s race so hopefully I’ll be able to
get back to my peak. Next races that I have are the regional athletics championships
in around two weeks time where I’m racing the 800m and 1500m.
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