This morning was my first attempt at riding B-Grade at the Club’s monthly race. At a few kilos heavier and a few watts less powerful than when I won my C-Grade races last season, it was always going to be hard work.
With B-Grade not starting until 8:30, I definitely enjoyed the extra hour in bed over riding C-Grade, but this enthusiasm soon dissipated when I headed off to LaPa on my warm-up ride — it was quickly apparent that my legs were not in the mood for racing today.
I arrived at Heffron a bit early, figuring I’d catch the end of the C-Grade race, only to find that the dodgy weather had confined almost everyone to their beds. I saw Stu ride past so shouted some encouragement, though it turned out that he was chaperoning the B-Grade Women’s race as no-one was there to race C-Grade Men’s.
It looked like being a sparse field for the A & B races too, though more people started arriving as the start time approached. We ended up with about 12 in B as the gun went and we rolled out at a fairly sedate pace. The course was damp in patches and no-one really wanted to crack the whip, so the first lap was really slow before one of the Turramurra guys decided to pick things up a bit on the second lap. From then on things were a bit quicker, but rather than being a consistent pace it was on/off. I spent the first few laps up near the front, then did about three quarters of a lap on the front before dropping to the back for some drafting and to see how things panned out.
The pace was fairly manageable, though the surges were a bit tiring and started my legs whinging. As we came on to the main straight to the bell for the prime lap, things hotted up a lot and I ended up with a gap to close into the headwind. That proved to be my undoing, my legs went bang as we entered the squircle and that was the end of my race.
Nick took off on a breakaway with about two laps to go and just managed to hang on. Ben won the sprint for second and one of the Turramurra guys was third.
My Race Stats: 25min,37.6km/h average, 283W Normalised Power