NBRC Stoke Hammond '10' 23rd April 2025

My 2025 time trial season continued with this club event on the F5d/10 Stoke Hammond course. This is a reasonably quick course, with about 6 miles of dual carriageway. Initial weather forecasts were for light rain (and very heavy rain very early on that day) but, though the early heavy rain showed up on schedule, we were spared the early evening rain. Wind was fairly light, but it wasn't very warm, and indeed was quite chilly by the time we were done and dusted.

We'd offered to roll over entries from the New Year's Day event, which we'd abandoned owing to spectacularly windy conditions, and several riders took up that offer. So this evening we had 12 riders, largely comprising the usual suspects, but with four riders from the Leighton Buzzard Tri Club.

I started about mid-way down the field, so I had a few riders ahead of me to aim for. For me, the race was fairly uneventful - I caught a couple of riders, and had no issues with any of the roundabouts, or with any drivers. Three other rider, however, experienced a van driver apparently deliberately close-passing, with verbal abuse being hurled (we later reported this to the police).

In terms of strategy, I was aiming to try and keep my power above 250W - recent time trials have seen me with a normalised power of about 257W. On this course there are some lengthy stretches of gentle descent, so I do find it slightly difficult at times to keep muscling out the power. Probably this is because I naturally seem to race at a pretty low cadence, despite trying the train at  quite hight cadence. I just seem to be able to produce more power by grinding a big gear. So, this evening, my normalised power came in at 254W, which I was quite pleased with. I finished in 23:06, which was good enough for first place, with a margin of over a minute to the second placed rider.

Next week, we are up on the Astwood course, which is my favourite of the courses we use. Let's see if the run of form continues.

Here are the data (click the image to enlarge):