Last week, if you didn't notice, the UK was hit by the snow apocalypse.
This proved a bit problematic for the first big weekend of the domestic mtb calender with both the first round of the national endurance series and the first round of the national xc series both being buried under snow! I was down to race the Whinlatter challenge in the Lake district (endurance series rd1) but decided to abandon that plan after seeing the midweek weather forcast.
It proved to be the correct thing to do as the race was postponed anyway! I was still keen for a race though and as the national xc was already full this left the Gorrick spring series event instead.
As it turned out the Gorrick was the warmest event of the weekend, a balmy -2.5 degrees with only 2 cm of snow on the ground!
After a quick practice lap (I'm hesitant to use the phrase warm up lap! I quickly hid in my van and put some more clothes on ready for the race. I seems ridiculous to be racing a 'spring' series event in late march whilst wearing a long sleeve base layer, a long sleeve skinsuit, a windproof jacket, legwarmers, thick socks, winter shoes, over shoes thick winter gloves and a head band!
Anyway onto the actual bike riding part... a whooping 5 of us lined up in expert/elite. The national xc swallowing up most of the UK's riders for the weekend meant that there was myslef, team mate Si Ernest, Jody Crawford, Trev Allen and James Darcy lined up for battle.
Si and Jody quickly buggered off at the start leaving a nice battle between Trevor, James and myself. This was looking like a good race for 3rd place as we were all pretty evenly matched. That was untill the end of the first lap when James snapped his chain and Trev abandoned. That was that really, I rode around sprinting up a few hills, falling off in the slippery mud every now and again secure in the knowledge that I'd won last place.
A bit of an anti climax really but at least i was riding my bike and I didn't turn into frosty the snow man.
1 comment:
We get snow similar to that here in Munich, except it's 10cm of snow on top of 2" ice! However, it's also got a special name we don't call it an apocalypse, it's instead called snow like we have all the time, and it's a hoot to ride on too :-)
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