After Tuesday's excitement at Palace, this Wednesday's LVRC crit race at Hillingdon surprisingly felt much harder than usual. Des Gayler (Kenton RC) got things going right from the gun by stringing things out immediately. In a crazy case of 'anything you can do...' I blasted past him up the drag. 30mph? yeah baby! and a massive gap on the field. Doh! er now what? With the headwind on the back straight this kind of intensity was not going to be sustainable. I soft pedalled for a while and a lap later had sixty old blokes for company.
Shit let me tell ya peeps were jumping away all over the circuit so it was quite difficult to know which breaks to go with. After a few tentative attempts I finally got away.
"Come on we need to go faster, they're gaining on us" words of Mick Hill (Team Quest). And with that he put in a little dig that sent three of us sprawling after his back wheel. We'd been away for around eight laps and had been working fairly efficiently. However the pace got a bit too hot for one guy so we were down to four and the breakaway was looking less sustainable... Almost a year to the day I was dropped from a similar group and on that occasion Colin Roshier asked me to sit on the back and not to contest the sprint. Well a year on I'm a bit stronger and if I say so myself definitely a help and not a hindrance... suddenly David Walls appeared on my back wheel; David took a turn on the front of the break and the speed up the drag dropped from 27mph to 24mph. Not good! this all round bunch entertainer was gonna need a telescope just to see our race numbers if he fancied taking another turn. One lap later Mick bailed to save energy for another attempt and the bunch did what bunches do - gobbled us up
After that no other significant breaks was formed - indeed from then on it was just a case of 'burning the matches' with lots of desperate attempts to sod off up the road. I don't remember ever working so hard to try to get away. And good or bad there would be a price to pay for my efforts. So with around 15 laps to go, having just been reeled in for what felt like the 10th time I was sat near the back recovering. Now during the race the headwind would occasionally let rip and slow things down to club run pace. It happened a couple of times but on the third occasion I was not prepared. So damn, in one almost surreal moment half the bunch had magically transported themselves 50 metres in front of the rest of us. WTF! Aarrgghhh...how did that happen?
Phil Sheehan (Finchely RT) had told me to watch out for splits in heavy wind at Hillingdon. Shit too late!?... Along with another guy I started to grind out the watts just to get across the gap but all I could see each lap was the front group disappearing around the corner and me and this other fella stuck in the proverbial no mans land. Out of the corner of my eye I could see this elderly Sikh gentleman watching from the grassy bank with slight amusement as this skinny black guy in a yellow top tried ride to his bike fast. Was he laughing at me? Did he think I was a looser? Maybe I'm not sure
Finally I... how do you say it "I put it all out there and made contact" Jesus that was hard. Two laps later I'd partially recovered and was relieved to see the lap board say six. With 4 laps to go I was suddenly overwhelmed with a "fcuk this for a bag of soldiers" moment and swung off the front and got ready to quit. As the tail end of the bunch squeezed past me I stopped gave myself a mental slap and some how jumped back on. On the penultimate lap I was 3rd wheel from the front. Someone had jumped clear but my tank was empty so I couldn't respond. On the final time up the drag the sit in sprinter types blasted clear and I ended up just outside the top ten. That was the hardest 1hr and fifteen minutes on the bike this year. Jesus!
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