Shrewsbury / Paramount road race

11/04/2010
west mids road league round 2
Shrewsbury
12th place overall from 90 riders

back to road racing today and feeling pretty well recovered from yesterdays time trial. Finally it feels like spring with the sun shining and and a bit of warmth in the air. Today's race was 66 miles around an undulating course with 1 or 2 little rises and taking place mainly on narrow tight roads, luckly the road surface was a bit more forgiving than the last race.

The race got going and started of pretty brisk and my found that it took me a while to really get my legs going, i made an effort to stay up towards the front and keep a careful eye on the main player. A few little breaks went away in the early stages and I managed to get in 1 or 2 moves but they didn't come to much. There was never a consistant rythem to the race and various attacks and counters just kept coming and going. We dragged back one of the main breaks that got away and at about the half way point another good break went which managed to pull a lead of about 1 minute on us in the bunch. There was a lot of attacking going on in our group which forced the pace up and by the last lap we had the gap down to about 15 seconds. The last km was all slightly up hill and on narrow roads so I knew I had to get a towards the front to stand a chance, we didn't quite catch the front group but I found my self on a good position for the sprint then next thing i know I'm boxed in to the curb. I had to use a bit of elbow to get in the open again at which point the sprint was taking off, I chased hard, low and in the saddle and manger to claw back a good number of places in the last 100m to finish 12 overall.

This I am very happy with and finally a result I can be pleased with, plus I gained some BCF points as well which is a nice bonus. So overall a good race and a good weekend of racing. I'm feeling pretty positive right now and am happy i can feel the improvments coming along.

More racing soon.