The mountain bike season finally got underway last weekend when I went over the Sherwood Forest for the first round of the British National Points Series (BNPS), a UCI C2 race. I knew a lot of people didn’t like the course, and it wouldn’t be best suited to me, being flat and technical but I was still really looking forward to it and dying to get back racing.
Pre-riding the day before confirmed it was as expected, a few small climbs, a lot of flattish stuff, and a couple of small descents, with very little in the way of technical stuff. There was a really strong field in the elite female race, the GB squad and several international riders, so I was keen to test myself.
I had a minor gear issue at the start and lost a few seconds, but as we got to the top of the first climb and into the singletrack I’d got up to the back of the lead group. Unfortunately the girl in front was pretty slow technically and there was no chance to pass for a while so we began to drop back. At the end of the first lap I was at the front of the second group, not too far away from the leaders.
From then onwards I don’t know exactly what was wrong but it just seemed incredibly hard and I was getting nowhere. My lap times got slower each time (I’m normally pretty consistent) and I got passed twice before the end but couldn’t do much to keep up. The course didn’t exactly inspire me, there were two enjoyable bits of singletrack on the whole thing – nice swoopy fast stuff, the rest all blurs together in my memory into a big painful, hardout slog. On the last lap my saddle started slipping down, and I kept having to stop and try to tighten in. The last straw I think, my head went a bit at that stage and I lost motivation to really push until the end.
Rubbish. So not exactly the start I’d been hoping for, hopefully just a bad day, a course with more hills and technical trails might help improve things. Failing that 7 weeks and counting until I can claim back my life from architecture college and train properly! I finished 10th so at least I got one valuable UCI point. Next stop, Yorkshire…