Well i say it was a 2 day event, but i only lasted about 1 and a half days...
Day One
First day went really well, apart from the torrential (ish!) rain at Hog Hill on Saturday morning before the time trial. We hid for aslong as possible out of the rain but i HAD to go round the quite technical course before the tt, so i braved it in the rain and i looked like i'd just had a shower when i got back in after ONE lap! i was not impressed andneither were my rollers, they made such a noise when i got on to warm up and was a bit dodgy when doing efforts! Anyway, i gave the tt everything i had, quite literally as i felt awful afterwards!, but the 6th place was definitely worth it, proper happy with that and looking good for GC.
Next was the circuit race, including the big hill, but in the opposite direction which was just as tough. There were quite a few attacks but nothing was getting away, just people dropping off the back up the hill, and some major dodgy breaking going on on the downhill! In the end i just rolled in in the bunch, but it was a tough 1hr race!
Day Two - ouch.
I was in 7th now on GC, so i just needed to stay in any front group or break in the road race, seemed pretty simple...
The race got underway and oh my gosh it was dodgy! Carnage. I'm sorry, but some women just need to learn to ride a bike in a straight line, corner properly and hold their line. So there was quite a bit of shouting going on, as usual i suppose. About 20 miles in though, i ended up on the pavement. We'd come flying downhill to a junction, bit of an S-bend with a terrible road surface, there'd been something going on infront of me, i tried to avoid it and ended up flying over the kerb. not happy. i don't totally remember what happened, but we weren't going slow which probably didn't help at all. Anyway i've left quite a bit of skin in essex, but luckily nothing is broken because i came down pretty badly on my shoulder.
National Circuit Champs
After crashing out last week i was looking forward to getting on with some fast town centre racing! And it was brilliant having the Langdale van there, looking dead professional near to Rapha and Endura etc. and yes, ofcourse we were allowed to park it there! ;)I knew today was going to be fast and god it was. I had a rubbish start with two women crashing into each other whilst attempting to clip in, so i spent the first few laps moving up, whilst numorous attacks happened, ouch. After getting back up near the front i just hung on, people were being dropped every lap and it wasn't long until about 10 of us were remaining. Not long after someone attacked and the group temporarily split (well that's what we hoped), i was in the back 6 and we were just getting the gap back when we met all the lapped riders. We also met them at the tightest left hand bend on the circuit, so ofcourse they were all over the road and the gap grew as we fought past the lapped group. The gap stayed at about 10 seconds for the majority of the race and our group dropped to 4 riders, with Sarah Storey towing us round! On the last lap when there were only the 8 of us left on the circuit, we just caught the back of the front 4, but it was too late and i finished in 7th. But an amazing win by Barnes :)!
Happy with the finish though i suppose, because there was such a good start list for the race today, so i didn't really know where i'd end up. Shoulder seems to feel a little worse though! oops.
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