At around 166km the first Benchmark race was going to be hard from the start. The comissionaire started on a positive note telling us that there would a large number of attritions. While the morning had started out cooler it soon became apparant that we were in for another hot day.
My role from the team briefing was to case down the breaks for the first 5km (I recently discovered that this wasn't actually my role and that the real message had been lost in translation and that if there were some easy breaks going early then I should be in them - a subtle difference of about 25kph). I start the race with David, riding on the bumper of the start car. There was quite a large neutral zone (around 8km) and a large field of around 110 who managed to occupy both lanes of the road.
Once racing commenced the pace was on from the start with riders sprinting off up the road. I managed to go with the first 2 attacks but then got swamped and boxed in on the left hand side. It was pretty chaotic! We turned at Cust to go towards Summer Hill. The wind had picked up and so we were now in a cross wind riding on the white line on the wrong side of the road. A rider swerved into me and I moved further right which pushed a guy 2 bikes behind me off onto the grass. Looking back I could see that Lana was struggling in the cross wind so I rode further to the left to provide some assistance. She struggled to keep up and before we knew it a gap had opened up in front and we were dropped. Tracey Clarke was also dropped so the 3 of us rode together up Summer Hill.
Along German road we picked up 3 more women and a couple of guys. The guys lasted about 200m before pulling out while the rest of us continued on. The peloton was still in sight but we weren't going to catch them in the wind. At Oxford there was a little bit of confusion over where the course went. Thankfully someone knew what road we were supposed to take as there were very few marshals on the course. We looped around back to Oxford. I had used up one bottle now and so had Lana and we still had 90km to go. I grabbed her bottle and said I would stop at the garage to get some water and then try and catch her up. I got the water and then rode at about 45kph all the way to Cust before catching them. The other 3 women had decided to pull out so it was back to Lana, Tracey and me.
We looped back around German road and then headed through the Ashley and on to Loburn. It was really hot and windy now and Lana was beginning to struggle. We stopped at the Loburn school to get some water again and then with the help of Traceys navigational skills we managed to make it to the finish. There was no one actually at the finish line which was hardly suprising given that we were about 58 minutes down on the winner.
When we got back to the car Malcolm said that he had been concerned about us. When I asked him why he said it was because we didn't have any water. He was obviously not concerned enough to actually come and look for us which is what Tracey's Thule team vehicle had done.
Still the team had some good news - Jeannie had won and Karen placed 3rd. Even Lana got a point for being 5th in the end.
If you read about my first Benchmark race last year then at least I managed to finish with someone this time!
No comments:
Post a Comment