Koksijde and Derby

Koksijde and Derby

 

With a much looked forward to weekend, but a long one at that, racing both days, Saturday and Sunday, with a lot of road miles in-between. On the Friday, we I spent the afternoon practicing on the Koksijde Junior world cup course, as I was there as part of team GB, the course was very dry and the files were the tyre of choice, spending around 2 hours on the course I felt confident that it was going to be a good but hard race, it will always be the most sandiest course I have ever ridden on, requiring a whole new level of bike handling skills, which I found out were essential after going over the bars a couple of times.

In the morning I was feeling confident and strong, I was gridded at the back due to the lack of UCI points, but this was all expected, on the starting straight, the pace was manic, a moved up a fair amount and on the First corner someone went down, slid across, and took my straight out, I go flying over the bars and get ran over a couple of times, (NOT NICE) I run back to the bike, and by this time I’m in dead last, and my saddle Is snapped in half, but the bike is just rideable, so I hop on a dive into the pits to swap bikes, still in dead last, over the next 35 mins, all I’m doing, is getting to groups and going past them, so from 85^th, I rode to 42^nd so not too bad,

Got back to the GB van and showered, and we were off back to the UK to get to derby ready for the national trophy, a long 5 hour trip that was.

With a good night’s rest under my belt I was ready to go again,

The course was long, windy and slippy in places, so was going to be a course for groups, I was feeling strong today but not on it due to racing the day before and travelling all day yesterday, I had a good warm up and was ready to go, gridded second, on first row, and a long straight ahead of me, the gun goes and what happens, my foot doesn’t clip in, second time. No luck. Third time lucky and by this time I’ve lost a fair amount of places, so I put the gas on, and get passed a load of riders, and get myself into the chasing group of the two riders ahead, a groups with around 10 riders and throughout the whole race attacks were coming from left right and centre and I kept my self in the top three of that group so I could go with any moves, and on the last lap, some riders crashed which I managed to avoid, and some of the other riders put there foot down going into the wind, I sheltered behind them and once it came to the last 700 meters or so through a set of technical corners and cambers I made my move and comfortably took 3^rd so not a bad day at all,

Big thanks to all my sponsors  cycleshack/FormeCoaching/Forme/USE/Kask/Accelerade