Astwood ’20’ 15/9/18

I realise I haven’t blogged too often about time trialling (and cycling in general) this year. That reflects considerable personal and work-related things getting in the way of (a) training, (b) racing, (c) cycle touring and (d) blogging.

At this point, I could note that our summer cycle tour had been planned to include many Outer Hebrides. It went seriously awry when a road accident delayed us while driving to Oban for the first ferry, which we subsequently missed by seconds. As it turned out, this was a good thing as Storm Hector blew in later that day, closing down the ferries we’d planned to use in the tour. So that was that.

We has a successful tandem trip to Normandy, which you can read about elsewhere on this site.

On the time trialling, disruption to my training meant that I didn’t acquire any form until August. At least that’s in time for heading off to ride the Duo Normand (for the 14th time!).

Anyway, we had a 20 mile club time trial on the Astwood course scheduled in the summer (it’s the NBRC Championship TT). Unfortunately it coincided with some damn fool football match between England and Croatia and no-one turned up. We re-scheduled it for one of the late season Saturday morning events, on 15th September.

On the day, we had only two riders show up, but as this was the TT Championship, Tony said we’d run the event. As I mentioned earlier, this was over two laps of our 10 mile sporting course based at Astwood. Weather-wise, this was a rather nice morning, sunny and cool, but with a rising breeze that offered a head wind on the opening leg to Chicheley. But from the outset, I felt pretty good, and once round the Chicheley turn I found myself cruising towards North Crawley at around 29mph. The drag to North Crawley saw my speed drop a bit, but it soome picked up as I rode through the village - and I still felt pretty good on the twisting road up past the University turn-off. I completed lap 1 in 24:14. I found the second lap pretty much the same as the first lap - I think for once I’d paced myself well! As I approached the descent prior to the finish climb, I was hoping against hope I come in under 50 minutes. I kept a fairly big gear turning up the hill to the finish - in 49:34, probably my fasted time for this course in several years (for example in late May, I finished in 51:17 in the TeamMK event on the same course).

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with the result, and I am looking forward now to my final event of 2018, the Duo Normand.