Stinking cold, happy with 8th place!

So this will be brief. It was my birthday, 44 years old. Man have those years flown by. Anyway there isn’t anything that makes you feel more like a kid again than thrashing about in the mud on a CX bike racing other likeminded individuals. Although some of the faces that Paul from pitch side photography has captured of me below would demonstrate otherwise.

Anyway, leading into the event I had managed to catch a stinking cold, which was brilliant. Luckily I was over the worst of it as Clanfield came round but all my training had gone totally out of the window after Newnham Park, the last race.

Just before the race I managed to get myself it a total fluster when I misplaced my timing chip and almost missed the start. I missed being gridded which was a pain but luckily a friendly competitor let me join to the side of him on row 3. My start was ridiculous and I found that my grumpiness and annoyance with my cold propelled me into 2nd exiting the first corner. Awesome I thought, oh look, thats legendary Paul Lloyd just in front of me, briefly. Paul is ridiculously good and rapidly vanished away, he is also leading the V40 category overall and finished 3rd in the worlds masters championship recently. Humbling to watch him to be honest. So I got to work and settled back down to a sensible level of exertion, you know, around 181 bpm. You can actually see it on my Wahoo watch in a picture below. Brutal.

So, in brief, sort of, I finished in 8th and was only 27 seconds off the podium. My chest was rasping and rumbling for the whole race and my nose was full of I don’t know what. I was rubbish running and on the climbs but I was saved by my technical prowess. When I say prowess, I mean I stayed upright and I made it round some sections quicker than most around me.

Roll on Andover, I’m not 100% yet but feeling better than this time last week.