Flies and Bikes Blog

This event saw the return of Team Grumpy to the NBRC club time trial scene. Unfortunately, this wasn't accompanied by nice time trialling weather.

I rode to work on the Cougar TT bike, in pretty steady rain.  It wasn't until I got there that I discovered that I'd not brought my racing aero helmet.  well, that was annoying, but not terminal.  During the course of the day, the rain eased, but the wind seemed to build up so that it was considerably stronger than the 15 mph forecast by the BBC.

Eventually, I got a lift home with my TT bike to collect my helmet, and I then rode back down to the clubroom, to meet up with Gerry.  I had emailed in to ask for a solo slot in the #1 position, but this had been given to someone else.  In any case, my plan to ride the event solo then at the end as a 2-up were going to be a bit thwarted as there really wasn't a big enough field.  After a bit of a discussion, Team Grumpy decided to ride the event as a 2-up.

Off to the start area, and we had a couple of annoyances.  Firstly we got stuck at the Bow Brickhill level crossing, and then I ended up having to take a detour up the A5 after tangling with traffic on a roundabout.  Still, that made for a good warmup.

Team Grumpy fell into our usual 2-up pattern, with smooth changeovers (though circumstances led to rather long spells at times). Getting up the drag to the dual carriageway was tough into the head wind, but once on the DC, we were pretty much OK, other than a couple of short stretches where the cross-wind was a bit of a hassle. In the end, we acquitted ourselves reasonably well, with 22:24.  Most astounding was the fastest time of the night, Tim Carter's 21:01.

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