Hill Climbs 2K12 Part 1

A major goal of mine this racing season was to do well in Hill Climbs. I fancy myself as a bit of a climber and seemed to do ok in them last year without much time/motivation/preparation so really spent the whole season waiting for them to come around again. In some ways that helped as it meant I had a large bottle of motivation stored up and hidden away, but perhaps also meant I didn't put as much effort in during the normal racing season as I perhaps could/should have. Oh well, you live and learn.

My 'second season' started way back in September with the Border City Wheelers open event up Hartside in Melmerby, Cumbria. I came away with a strong 3rd place behind Alistair Robinson and (as of last week newly crowned Junior National HC champ) James Knox. A pleasing result, a good 45s down on James over an 18min effort and god knows how many down on 1st. As you can see from the data: http://app.strava.com/rides/21384168#382511926 I wasn't holding anything back! There was then the small matter of starting my second year at University. Chaos, in a word; but in between moving into the new house and getting sorted etc I did the Welsh Championship event up Black Mountain, again placing 3rd. I was once again, some way off second place Jon Schubert and the rampant winning machine Dan Evans on another long climb, this time around 15min. Having been seeded relatively early I ended up catching (if I remember correctly) my 1 minute, 2minute, 3minute, 4minute, 5minute and nearly 6minute people; which is always nice. I took a few notable scalps in this event, which was also nice. I then tried and failed to peak for the Horseshoe Pass HC the Sunday after. I won't go into the details, but let's just say if you're going to try and peak make sure you plan how you're going to do it better than me!

I got 3rd on the Horseshoe last year in what I now realise was a pretty good time of 9:39 and spent the whole year thinking 'I can win on that hill'. Unfortunately that meant I ended up trying too hard to make sure everything was perfect this year; as I said I tried to peak but didn't quite get it right and then did far too hard a warm up on the day. I should have just treated it as just another event and taken it in that stride, but tried too hard to make it special and it backfired. Like I said earlier, you live and learn. I still placed 3rd again (in fact this year ahead of a bigger entry of over 100 riders) but was significantly down on last year's performance coming in at 10:12. Admittedly everyone was slower than normal due to it being REALLY COLD but I worked out the percentages that a few other people who did it last year as well were down by and mine was by far the biggest; which left me thinking that if I had just carried on training that week as normal and done a shorter more panicked warmup like normal, I probably would have gone significantly quicker. Hey ho, that's racing and it could have been much worse! I then had a week off (or should I say my poor Mum and Dad had a week off from running me up and down the country-they are the truly the real stars of this) which coincided with me having a Metric F*ck ton of Uni work to do. Which was nice.

I'd sort of planned the season to represent a isosceles triangle in that as the weeks progressed, so the length of events I did decreased. The idea being that with the National Championships being on the Infamous Rake in Ramsbottom (a 2:30 climb for the really fast guys) I would effectively taper my racing in the preceding weeks. I'm fairly certain there will be some science backing that up, but if I'm being completely honest the events just happened to be ones that fitted in. So as pre-Nationals prep I travelled back home to tackle a pair of climbs I did last year. 

The first was up L822. It's a relatively new event, so the hill doesn't really have a name yet other than 'Barley Lane', but at around 4mins it was a good one to do the week before the Big One. I improved on my time of last year by a modest margin but improved on my placing by coming...you guessed it, 3rd. Tejvan Pettinger was about 30s ahead of the second placed rider (who, interestingly, was not wearing a helmet despite it being flagged up as a Hard Shell Compulsory Event, not being a sore loser-just an observation, rules should be rules) who was 3.7s up on me. Sunday saw us return to the other side of Pendle Hill for the Nick O'Pendle event. The Nick is a famous climb and one of the Standards if you will, having hosted the Nationals in the past and had riders attempt to better Chris Boardman's record for a good few years! I knew it would be difficult to maintain my run of podiums in this one purely due to the class field. Mr Knox was riding again, as was Pettinger and Matt Pilkington. All had beaten me by significant margins in the past so even with a magic form day it would be tricky to beat any of them. As it happens, I didn't beat any of them and in fact ended up in 5th place, but in a faster time than last year-nothing to complain about! A solid weekend's racing and fooding complete (no matter how good I become at cooking nothing beat's Mothermade food) and I was ready to chill out ahead of the BUCS Uni champs and Nationals the next week.

More on that story another time...

Did You Miss Me?

October already?

Many, many things have happened since my last post. In no particular order: I've aged significantly, moved house, had a haircut, built a time trial bike, legally changed my Twittername, officially become a better racer, stopped eating cake (well, almost), perfected the art of cooking risotto, had a bizarre string of Open Hill Climb placings, nearly been murdered by a horse, cracked a bike frame, probed the scarily deep depths of discomfort a human can actually endure, learnt a completely useless French tense, made a pretty good byriani, discovered that by just eating less it is possible to lose weight, started wearing a tw*t hat, made many more additions to the GurnFolder, actually had veins appear visible on my legs, stumbled upon a far tastier and healthier ride snack, won a few trophies, started eating cake again in style, and most recently made myself feel a bit queasy eating a whole bag of cookies in about ten minutes. True story.

That's a pretty random collection of things that have happened, and I'm sure you would just love to hear about each and every one in detail (after all, what else is a blog for if not a medium through which to babble on about oneself?) but unfortunately I have neither time, patience nor desire to enthrall/bore/make you unfollow me on twitter with about 20,000 words on my life since my last post. I will however just pretend I didn't forget to blog at all over summer and pick up where I supposedly left off, which was about a month ago. 

Can you blame me for 'forgetting' to blog over summer? It's odd when I think about it, I have lots and lots of work to be doing now-I had nothing at all to do over summer-and yet I'm writing this...stay tuned for my next post where I actually talk about stuff! Honest.