Wednesday 12 August 2009

A Family weekend away

Following the disaster that was 24/12 a 2 week break from training and racing was required in order to get my mind and body back on the right path.

This weekend signalled the beginning of the build up to the second big target of my season, Relentless 24, my 24h solo debut.

The weekend was spent racing at sleepless in the saddle as a mixed team. The intentions were to have a nice relaxed weekend away. The team was a family affair with husband and wife Greg and Katy, mother and son (yours truly and the associated mother) and Andy. We were riding as the St Ives CC team, my local cycling club.

Stupidly I volunteered to do the first lap and the run. This was a bad idea; it appears that I am not brilliant at running. I returned to the arena just about holding off a stitch in around 30th position and quickly grabbed my bike. By the time I returned after the first lap I was in 8th position. I handed the baton to Greg and promptly forgot to tell and one I had arrived back and started talking to people in the area! Solo is far simpler!

The plan was to do single laps until darkness, when Katy would do a double to enable to skip a lap later on in the night. The reason for this was that we had to look after their 2 year old daughter, Milly. It’s quite complex balancing racing and babysitting at the same time!
As darkness fell Andy, Greg and myself did a double lap each to enable the others to grab a little sleep. As dawn broke news came that we were in 4th position and closing fast on 3rd. This came as a bit of a surprise as we were really just away for a nice social weekend!

As the end of the race neared we had reached 3rd position. We had a 5 minute lead over 4th when mum went out for her last lap. She pushed hard and came back in with a lead. I then went out for a hard lap followed by Greg before sealing it with another lap with 15minutes to go. We held our 3rd position, a great result for a nice family weekend away!

St Ives CC also had a men’s team entered who finished 30th and Russell rode solo and finished 18th all in all a great effort.

My Iron Horse-Extreme team mate Dave was also racing. Unfortunately he had to pullout due to a back injury after a strong first half of the race... he’ll be back!

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