National Championships

This weekend I had the challenge of defending my National Champion title in my first Irish race of the year. I was looking forward to getting back to the friendly race scene here and riding a new course at Dunmore Mountain.

There were no pre-rides the day before so I headed up early to get in a practice lap on the morning. The course was cool but really tough. 100% singletrack, much of it on thick grass with a few schlompy patches to power through and lots of sharp rocks. It was full of short, steep kickers with 2 slightly longer steep, rocky climbs each followed by some nice descents. There were a couple of steepish, rocky chutes but overall nothing super technical.

I had a good warm-up but a 10 minute delay at the start left meant I’d really cooled down and struggled to get going for the first few minutes. The ladies race became an open championship, a combination of the Elite and Masters category – a great idea to make sure we had a competitive race despite the low numbers competing. Four of us lined up at the start, with masters rider Beth McClusky posing my main threat.

We started with Ciara McManus going off like a rocket and getting ahead to set a ferocious pace. I managed to hold on to her and sneaked ahead a few minutes in as she slid out on an off camber section. Beth was right on my back wheel and later pulled ahead on one of the short climbs. I had to really go flat out to hold her within easy sight for the next two laps. I had my work cut out, she was flying up the climbs but I found myself lacking power and struggling to keep up – give me a long, steady climb any day!

On lap 3 Beth began to pull away, I totally blew up, just couldn’t keep the pace up and dropped nearly a minute on lap time. The course was so intense, there was no chance to recover at all, straight from a hard climb into a fast, physical decent and then repeat! Getting chance to drink was nearly impossible.

On the 4th lap I really dug deep, trying to find some extra energy so that I could work back and raced the Masters men to help keep pushing. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t go any faster. With no sign of Beth in front of me and I began to realise there would be little chance to catch her but kept going just in case. By the last lap I nearly had to give up braking as I was getting finger cramps every time I pulled the levers and was pretty happy to cross the line just before a torrential downpour began. I finished in second place, 2.5 minutes down (full results here).

So a bit of a frustrating and disappointing day, although I was going ok, I know that I haven’t hitting the best form recently, I think all the racing in June is still taking its toll. I would have loved to win, but congratulations to Beth, she was really strong on the day. I certainly enjoyed having such a hard, close fought race and it’s another experience to learn from.

Thanks to UCD, Met and Think Bike for their support and to Dromara CC for the organising and a great course.

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