2010 Team Series Wrap-up

Two weekends ago was the final race of the Team Series, and with a hilly course suiting my strengths and several of the series' best riders away in Ireland at the Ras na mBan stage race, I was looking forward to a good result. So with a team of four strong riders we were off to Coalville to race on a chilly and windy but thankfully dry September morning.

We rolled out of the HQ, across the road and 400m later past the lap/finish line: 6 laps to go, 14.5km per lap. This was a longish race Team Series standards, but that was fine with me. Leona was behind the lead car as it pulled away, and with all the Motorpoint girls (juniors, nearly every one of them) chatting away about school, boys and whatnot, I casually made my way up the group to sit beside her. And then picked up the pace just a bit. And then decided to ride off the front ever so slightly... peeked behind and the bunch was somewhat noticing but not really.

All of sudden Emily came flying past me and I let her get a gap of 30m or so. Nobody reacted because it was so early (2km into an 87km race!) and I'm sure they thought she would come straight back to us in a minute or two. Then MaxGear's Anna Fischer -- one of the best domestic riders in the UK right now -- flew past on her way over to Emily and I decided this was a wheel I needed to jump on. I did, and we quickly reached Emily who was able to grab my wheel and the next thing I knew we were away with a massive gap. And so it stayed for the next 85kms.

First lap we pulled out a minute, second lap another minute, by the third lap that seemed to be holding (Anna's teammates policing the bunch with Leona's help, and Motorpoint not able to get anything going) and by the fourth lap there was word that two riders were 2 min behind us and the bunch was not chasing. At that point, even though we were slowing down from our original lap-times (not helped by the wind picking up), I knew we'd stay away from everyone as long as we kept working.

But my legs were not good. Emily was having a really great ride, I had been worried at first that she'd get gapped on the sharp hill before the turn into the finish-line draggy straight, but she hung on. And did more than her share on the flats and into the wind. Anna did quite a bit too, in fact I felt like I was the weakest of the three of us at times, struggling a bit with an upset stomach from early that morning and legs threatening to cramp up. Frustrating, but I could live with it.

In retrospect Emily and I should have been attacking Anna on the last lap, taking turns at it, but in the moment we didn't really have our plan organised and frankly I wasn't convinced we could beat Anna anyway. Emily selflessly sat on the front most of the last lap and when Anna attacked going up the hill before the final corner I went with her for about 5 seconds til my legs said "no way" and my brain stupidly said "2nd place is fine" so I came in about 100m behind her with Emily another 100m behind me. Not a bad result really, though of course now I'm annoyed with myself for giving up the win without a fight!


Looking rough at the halfway point (from left: me, Anna, Emily) (courtesy of race organiser Nick Horner-Maddocks)

But the best was yet to come... after the finish we turned around to go back and watch the other riders come in. I was curious who the 2 riders between us and the bunch were and much to my delight it was Leona with a giant grin on her face, having outsprinted her break companion to come 4th! Mathilde ended 11th, rolling in with the next group as the bunch had split again at some point. So that meant top team was us, Surrey League. All in all a pretty successful day and a satisfying finish to the end of my road race season. Great rides by Emily and Leona made for 3 happy girls on the long ride home.


Leona and her break partner Maxine Filby working together (courtesy of race organiser Nick Horner-Maddocks)

Later we learned that with our strong finish at Coalville, we managed to leap over the Rapha Condor team in the overall standings into 3rd. A nice way to end the season and it showed that consistent performances are just as important as stand-out performances when it comes to a season's overall results (see the series report on British Cycling's site).

Good legs

Funny how it only takes a few days of good riding to feel happy again about being on the bike. My saddle sore has recovered and I'm over whatever mysterious illness I had a week ago at Hog Hill (blinding all-day headache stupidly compounded by riding 50km to get to the race through the dustiest smoggiest part of east London) which left me dropped from the lead group on the bell lap and struggling for a 7th place finish.

Sunday saw me at the Team Series race in Melbourne, Derbyshire, one of the more hilly races on the calendar and thus suiting me well. With three of us from the Surrey League team in the front group of 18 (it was a race of attrition more than attacks) and the other two in the second group, we managed three top-12 finishes and fifth place overall team. Considering my form and preparation wasn't the best, I was pretty happy with the result against a strong field with several big teams represented.

Monday's ride saw me in Richmond Park under the guise of recovery, but my legs despite being a bit fatigued were awesome and I actually stopped to recalibrate my powermeter because I thought it was reading too high! Two clockwise laps in under 45 min and 195 watts... so much for recovery.

Tuesday's Palace race was off due to the wet course, but I was commissairing anyway and we ran the kids' races on the top circuit instead. I had opted to drive the car for some stupid reason and learned my lesson there: nearly 30 min longer than it takes to ride my bike! Never again.

Then yesterday was our club 10 TT, this time a 2-up team event though I had asked permission to run a 4-up with Leona, Emily and Lise as training for this weekend's Etape de la Defonce stage race. I headed out early to the hills to get a few more miles in my legs and to my surprise the supposed southwest headwind felt like a tailwind. And my powermeter must have been off again too, as the watts were reading a bit higher than the effort would have said. Nope, all good... so there I was, gliding up the hills and flying along the flats, trying to hold back a bit for the TTT but my legs would have none of it. Until the puncture of course, but that just gave me more reason to haul it along the A25 to get to the club 10 signing-on in time.

The TTT itself went very well, we took the first half steady (again I noted the lack of headwind and wondered how the return leg would go). When we turned around to come back, there was no wind there either and we caned the last few miles in a very smooth through-and-off for a respectable 24:34 time -- all of us on roadbikes with not a stitch of aero gear.

Siting in the car on the way home, I mused that it had been one of those rare days when there's always a tailwind, the hills seem flatter and riding a bike is just plain fast. It was the anti-Shut Up Legs day. We cyclists often moan about the omnipresent headwinds, the steep hills, the crappy road surfaces, etc. but yesterday was just the opposite for me. Seems my legs are coming back nicely. Dare I hope for a good result at the race this weekend?


(Click the pic to order one of these t-shirts from the Cycling Tips blog)

Bedford 2-day Stage Race, day 2

If I thought day 1 was pretty tough, I had no idea what day 2 had in store! We woke up to blustery 4 degree temps, with the added fun of sideways rain squalls coming over every hour or so. The Millbrook testing centre -- built for testing cars and trucks -- would have been a great place to race had it been nice and sunny, but without any indoor facilities or running water, we had to make do with sheltering ourselves in the parking lot and changing in our vehicles. Luckily between Leona's van and Emily's camper we could set up a cosy little basecamp with our turbo trainers and stay dry and warm for the most part.

The morning started with an individual time trial, two laps around the banked oval speed circuit totalling about 6.5km. I had set myself a time goal of under 10 minutes and much to my surprise managed to pull that off. It was a tough race though, as we started into a headwind, gradually picked up a tailwind as we rode around the oval, then ran straight into a headwind again by the lap/finish line. Twice! My speed fluctuated between 30km/h at my slowest to 50km/h at my fastest -- all of which was on a dead flat smooth road.


Quite the outdoor velodrome!


My time of 9:45 put me into 8th place for the ITT and 13th place overall on the GC which would turn out to be the highest I'd get for the whole race. I managed 276 watts AP/NP, so perfectly paced and new power records to boot, which was quite pleasing. Maybe I should be thinking more about racing the individual pursuit on the track...?

We had a few hours to kill between the morning and afternoon races, and in that time Jim and Eddy were racing the men's support event. It hadn't warmed up and if anything the wind had gotten even stronger and more gusty. Jim had on every layer of gear he'd brought and then some, but never managed to warm up and dropped out after two laps of the hilly road circuit. He spent the rest of the day chilled -- no doubt made worse by standing out during our race and taking lots of photos -- and came down with a cold the following day. Eddy finished in 15th place in a race where nearly half the starters DNFed.

With just a single lap of the "alpine circuit" part of the course (consisting of a half-mile climb at 7%, a swift twisty downhill, then another 200m power climb at 14%) under our belts for a warmup, we headed to the start line for a neutralised lap of the oval then nine laps to follow. Having been warned about the more dangerous corners where the road narrowed and crosswinds kicked in, I was perhaps a bit overcautious as I ran off the front of the bunch leaving the oval and rode the next five minutes on my own, 10 seconds ahead of the bunch. An extra warm-up as it were, and an opportunity to stay out of trouble as the crosswinds caught some people out.

The next few laps were steady, though Catherine Williamson of Rapha attacked along with Anna Fischer of MaxGear to clean up the sprint and hill points. They never got more than a minute ahead of the bunch under the watchful eye of Horizon Fitness, even after a third rider joined them. Jim had suspected that Horizon had a deal amongst themselves to get Dani King the road race wins and Sarah Storey the overall GC, and he was right: no break was going to get away without the two of them in it.

As the bunch dwindled with every lap and my legs started to feel the punishment of the climbs, which were neither long enough nor steep enough to do me any favours, I had to fight to stay up near the front. Even if I crested the 14% hill at the front, I often lost lots of space on the downhill, and had to ride hard to get back on the bunch into the brutal headwind that followed. Then recover as best as I could in the oval, come out and cross the bridge and start it all over again for a new lap. I had a sneaking suspicion that I couldn't last the whole nine laps in that yo-yo, and I was right. On lap five, even as I was thinking to myself that I had to move up before the climb started, an attack went and our bunch of 20 split into three different groups with me in the third. Willpower was lacking, but legs were lacking even more. We tried to get back on, but once our little group realised that the chase was futile -- all the big names were in the front group, which would later catch the break, and the second group contained another eight strong riders -- we set about working together just to get through the rest of the race.

And so it went for the last four laps: in the oval and on the flat bits into the wind, we worked a smooth paceline; the hills we rode tempo and the descents we grouped back together. One rider attacked on our second lap together and rode off not to be seen again. That put us down to eight, which shortly turned to seven as another rider cramped up and suffered off the back. Those seven lasted the last laps, and as we left the oval to begin the bell lap, I crunched down an Energy Surge and started thinking about how I could win our group sprint. First step: push the pace a bit more on the climbs, as I was easily making it up the hills in better shape than my companions. Second step: wait until the pace inevitably slowed and people started missing turns in the oval for the final mile or so, then attack. And sure enough, as we rode along with the tailwind and passed the 1km to go sign, the two riders up front stopped working and started chatting. I took that opportunity to launch the sprint of my life to come around them, and to get as aero as I could to put as much space between them and me as possible. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only 20 seconds, I chanced a glance behind and saw that not only was I alone, I had a gap of nearly 100 metres.

Riding straight into the headwind, I was starting to hurt pretty badly, but soon the 200m banner appeared and shortly after that the finish line. I was losing speed rapidly -- down from 55km/h max after I launched my sprint to 32km/h into the wall of wind -- but I managed to hang on to get across the line clear of everyone else by several seconds. And it was worth it: that gap would get me one extra place higher on the GC, from 17th overall to 16th. And it was a nice finish to an otherwise disappointing race where I'd hoped to finish more like top 10.

Nonetheless, given the strength of the field this year I can't say I'm unhappy with my result. And I'm extremely proud of my teammates who all finished the race, which is more than can be said about most of the other teams. In fact, of 17 teams who entered, we were one of only three with no DNFs. Had the overall rankings for the team standings been done on cumulative rider time instead of finishing placings, we would have finished a strong 5th place with all our riders placing in the top 60 of 90 entrants. Between Rachel's strong day 1 race and Leona's strong day 2 race, they both salvaged good GC placements. Emily put on a great showing for her first stage race ever, and Claire despite feeling under the weather all weekend gutted it out and finished every race in the top 2/3rds of the field.

Here are the final BC results, and report/pics as well. And the nearly 300 photos that Jim took on day 2 are on Flickr too.

I've taken my 25 favourite and created a little slideshow below (collage above). Onward to the next one!

Bedford 2-day Stage Race, day 1

Quick report on the first day of the Bedford 2-day race, pics to come later.

This year we put together a team of five Surrey League riders quite complementary to each other in ability and experience. It seems the Team Series is getting a bit more serious with every passing year, with Sarah Storey's Horizon Fitness team topping quite a solid list of contenders. With our team lacking any elite or near-pro riders, our plan was always to do our best to hang in there and well, do our best. And enjoy ourselves as always. At least this year I felt like I knew all my teammates pretty well, which made it a lot more interesting and fun.

The weather, unlike last year, was rainy, cold and windy, but also unlike last year, I managed not to fall apart completely. Our TTT this morning looked and felt quite a bit better drilled than last year, but we finished only 8th out of 17 teams, a full 2:22 behind Horizon Fitness (who finished 1:34 ahead of everyone else). The stiff headwind and lack of TTT practice couldn't have helped, but I couldn't help feel a bit disappointed and wondering if we could have done better.

With that on my mind, I went into the afternoon race feeling less than optimistic for a strong GC placing in this stage race, but kept reminding myself that I just needed to stay in the front group to mitigate the morning's results. High hopes to get in a break if I played my cards right, though with the strong winds and relatively flat course being a "big girls' race", I wondered if that would be possible. The first lap started out hard with Horizon keeping the bunch at a manageable pace: hard enough to shell the less-fit riders, not hard enough to string it out too badly. My legs felt okay, but not great. Good enough to hang in, good enough to be near the front to watch everything unfold, not good enough to make any real go of it on my own. Second lap, more of the same though with the hill and sprint primes thrown in, things were getting tougher. On the third lap, Natalie Creswick from Twickenham attacked and the bunch let her ride off to a maximum gap of about 20 seconds. After nearly a lap on her own, another rider tried to bridge across and shortly afterwards I decided to try and follow; nothing doing. Legs were just not enough for me to attack into a headwind! I was brought back, leaving two riders out there hanging. And I decided that would be the extent of my attempts to hurt myself today.

And yet, a few minutes later after a third rider had gone off to join them, I found myself in a promising position near the front of the slower-than-expected bunch as former pro Catherine Williamson from Rapha and her teammate Ang Mason took a flyer. I saw this potential six-woman break as something that could be big, so despite my previous agreement between brain and legs, I found myself flying off after them. I caught them and we began to work well towards bridging to the other three. But alas, before we could really reach them, the bunch strung out behind four Horizon riders -- they had none in our would-be group of six -- and we were all reeled in. It stayed this way for the rest of lap 4.

Then coming over the lap/finish line hill for the bell, I made the crucial error of finding myself too far back in the bunch as an attack (containing two Horizon riders) went. And to compound it, I had to take a hastily-timed bottle hand-up that nearly spit me out the back of the dwindled bunch. Luckily I got back on without a problem, but the five riders in the break were well gone, and after a few minutes of spirited chase, the rest of us more or less gave up and they were gone for good.

So the last lap was ridden in a group of 25 or so, and we lost a few of those to a bad crash during a moment of inattention once we had sat up. Coming into the final miles, a few early attacks went off the front for the finish but I managed to keep them close until the final few hundred metres up the hill when my legs finally cried out for mercy and refused to stop working. After what seemed like forever pedalling through wet cement, it was over and I had finished 13th overall. I later heard that the winning break of five consisted of Sarah, her teammate and top rider Dani King, the former pro Catherine, and one top-ranked rider each from MaxGear and Halesowen. Had I been in that break, I would have been hard-pressed to do much work without being shattered! So in that sense, I can't be disappointed with how I did; I finished about halfway in the front group behind the break, and ended up 18th in the GC at the end of the day.

Our team had a strong performance by Rachel -- who ironically rides for Rapha these days, but not in the Team Series -- as she hung on until the bell when the attack went and she dropped off the back. She caught a few other riders on her solo lap and finished well. Leona and Emily were in the next bunch and Claire came in a lap down but still in the top 2/3rds overall.

Tomorrow is the ITT, promising a 10-minute session of pain and suffering, followed by a hilly road race that probably suits me better than today's wind-fest. And hopefully my creaking old legs will let me play a bit harder!

British Cycling's report on day one is here.

Today's power numbers:

TTT

Duration:   16:49 (17:02)
 Work:       223 kJ
 TSS:        30 (intensity factor 1.035)
 Norm Power: 243
 VI:         1.1
 Pw:HR:       -8.73%
 Pa:HR:       -2.75%
 Distance:   9.115 km
 Elevation Gain:     150 m
 Elevation Loss:    146 m
 Grade:      0.1 %  (5 m)
  Min Max Avg
 Power:        0 481 221  watts
 Heart Rate:   105 182 166  bpm
 Cadence:      54 141 95  rpm
 Speed:        6.8 45.9 32.6  kph

Road Race

Duration:   2:07:54
 Work:       1329 kJ
 TSS:        159.2 (intensity factor 0.864)
 Norm Power: 203
 VI:         1.17
 Pw:HR:       -3.15%
 Pa:HR:       -1.46%
 Distance:   79.398 km
 Elevation Gain:     586 m
 Elevation Loss:    596 m
 Grade:      -0.0 %  (-11 m)
  Min Max Avg
 Power:        0 697 173  watts
 Heart Rate:   114 183 159  bpm
 Cadence:      39 182 100  rpm
 Speed:        15.2 65.7 37.2  kph