The weekend was a mix of riding a 10 mile TT, organising a race, and being glad I don’t organise or ride the Giro d’Italia.
Saturday was a 10 mile TT in Leighton Buzzard on a little known F12/10 course. I did 20.42 which is quite good for a single carriageway. A good little course, though a shame about the potholes on the way out and the 2nd roundabout 1 mile in to the race.
Sunday was our club 10 mile TT on the local Witney course, using the A40. (Results at Sri Chinmoy CT) At 9am on a Sunday morning, the road is really quite quiet. Not too much passing traffic. I like the course because there is a hill (well kind of uphill drag) and there is only one roundabout. The main drawback is the speed of the cars can be a little off-putting, at least when you’re in the layby waiting for the event to start. When you actually get riding, it doesn’t seem as bad as sitting at the side of the road.
When you cycle you tend to spend a lot of time looking at the weather forecasts. But, when you’re organising an event you spend even more time rechecking all the weather forecasts. On Thursday, the forecast showed rain for Sunday morning. That leaves the difficult call of whether to cancel race or not. I really hoped the forecast would change, and obligingly the weather gods gave us a very nice Sunday morning. Warm, and low wind. An organiser and racers dream.
All I can say is I’m glad I’m not organising the Giro d’Italia (or riding it for that matter). I was watching a shortened stage last week as the riders were finishing in freezing temperatures, falling snow and riders struggling for survival. The race had been cut to only 150km and only one large mountain pass. But, Eurosport were still getting comments from viewers lamenting that riders these days were soft and too willing to cut short stages. Questions were asked – what happened to the heroic era of cycling, where to be a true champion you had to ride through a seven hour snow storm, get frostbite and take six months to recover? It does
I would guess these viewers wanting to see more ‘heroic’ stages spend considerable more time sitting on the sofa than riding a bicycle through the wet and cold. My only thought at the end of the stage was – how heroic do you have to get? It would have been too masochistic to have to watch the riders go up another climb. It’s one thing to keep riders going in tough conditions, it’s another thing to break riders health for some false goal of being ‘heroic’
It does remind you of the Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch. ‘Well when I was a procyclist, we would get up 3 hours before breakfast and ride through ice and snow – just to get to start line of Het Volk, and when we’d finished we’d have to mend our broken bike ourselves!….‘
Anyway, although you always worry as an organiser, before the event everything seemed to go very well. It’s all a fairly nice way to spend a Sunday morning.
Nick English (AW Cycles) winner of the event.
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