Cadence Report

The first round of the Junior National Series, the Cadence Junior Road Race, is now completed and I am now looking on to the next round, the Junior Tour of Bristol.

Cadence went ok... It could have been a lot better but under the circumstances it wasn't too bad. These circumstances involved me getting a cold half way through the week before the race. I was hoping I'd get over it before race day, but unfortunately I didn't and as a result I had real trouble breathing properly through the race and could not breath through my nose at all as it was completely blocked.

The race was 7 laps of a 9.7 mile circuit, 68 miles in total, which include a steep climb at around 600 metres in length every lap. I have inserted the course profile below. The hill hurt A LOT but I was getting over it quite comfortablely towards the front of the bunch every lap and I could see that the bunch was getting smaller and smaller every time we peaked out over the top of the climb. On the penultimate climb there were 9 riders off the front and bunch went down to about 30 riders, from the 100 starters. Unfortunately team mates Charlie Fawke and Tom Laker got shelled out the back this time along with many other riders, however, in Tom's situation he was also suffering from a cold which has subsequentely turned into a virus since the race. Considering this, he did pretty well to last as long as he did. On the last lap my legs were still feeling pretty strong and I decided to wait for the final cimb, which the finish line lay on top of, before making my big effort. There were already 9 riders away so we were only going for 10th place in the bunch. I was sitting 8th wheel coming onto the foot of the climb and the legs were still good. Annoyingly as soon as the road steepened my legs were filled with the worst cramp I think I've ever had. I tried pushing through the cramp but my legs just seized up and I nearly came to a stand still. I gritted my teeth and struggled to ride thorugh it to the finish, even though I was going very slowly by this point.

By the end of the slow and painful climb to the top I found out that I finished 40th from the100 starters (race results: http://www.cadencecycleracing.co.uk/cjrr_info/cjrr_results.11.pdf) and I was right near the back of the group of 30 odd riders I was in. I was very annoyed with the cramp as I knew if it hadn't happened I would've been up there on the climb. It was ever more frustrating as I knew it could have been easily avoided. This was because I had finished both my bottles on my bike after 1 hour 45 mins and I then took another bottle in the feed zone at the 2 hour mark. Unfortunately, there was Coke in the bottle I was given as one or two of the guys in the team like to have Coke in the last hour of the race. However, I do not and I struggled to drink during the last two laps due to its fizziness and ended up only managing a few mouthfuls before giving the rest to Charlie. This meant that in the last hour and 15 mins of racing I only had a few sips of coke therefore leaving me to get cramp, as the wikipedia page on leg cramps states 'Causes of leg cramp include...dehydration'. I thought I had mentioned previosuly that I don't like Coke in a race, but maybe I didn't make it clear enough and in the future I will make it very clear that I only want energy drinks or water passed up to me in the race.

All in all, the race could have gone much better for me and the team as a whole. However, I can take some positives from the race as I managed to finish well inside the top half of the field in the select bunch, despite being ill and getting cramp in the finale. With this in mind I am very positive about the weekend coming as I am going to Belgium to race both Saturday, with team mate Charlie Fawke, and then on Sunday, with the whole team at the junior Gent-Wevelgem race. I have given myself high expectations as I aim to get top ten in both races. I am also very positive about the next round of the juniors series, the Junior Tour of Bristol.

My face clearly shows that the climb was a painful one.

Despite the dissappointment at Cadence, I am top of my league in the road.cc Fantasy Cycling 2011 game, and 63rd overall out of the 1651 teams on the game and these are the lads that I selected for Milan - San Remo to get me into this position:

And these are the mugs that are behind me, dr_brock, in my league.

Another Sunday and another Serrl

This weekend marked another Sunday and another Serrl road race, this one a little less intimidating than last weekend as it was only 60 miles and was only a 2/3/4 event. The Cycling Teacher was meant to be team leader for the race but unfortunately he fell ill and had to withdraw himself from the race the night before. Team manager and team sponsor at the race, Trevor Holmes, therefore decided that me and Drew would be the team leaders for the day.

The race was pretty steady for the first two laps with the only worry being the endless amount of attacks from Dulwich Paragon riders, who seemed to have 50% of the field in their jersey. I tried to get into a few moves but nothing was allowed to get away and as the circuit wasn't super hilly it was quite hard to make a break happen. After about 3 laps team mate Tom Laker made his routine crash when the guy in front of him came down claiming that his ' brand new and unused slippery tubs' just sipped on the corner, it didn't sound very convincing to me.

With one lap to go the race was still all together and in the first quarter of the last lap a group of 3 riders rode away from the peloton. The riders in the break weren't very strong and they were pretty much just let to go off the front as everyone presumed they'd come back fairly quickly. Unfortunately this did not happen and once we came to the main climb on the circuit, the top of which was only 1.5 miles from the finish, they still had a gap. At this stage my legs were feeling fine and this other guy who had seemed strong during the race attacked. I considered following but then decided against it as I had already got it in my head that I would wait for the sprint, still presuming the other riders would come back. Once we were over the top of the climb I found myself around 6th wheel and was 4th wheel with about a mile to go. At this point everybody sat up and I found myself right at the front riding into the wind with nowhere to go. I stupidly remained here and then when the sprint started, not very surprisingly, I had no zip left in my legs. I was pretty angry afterward, especially after finding out that the guy who had attacked over the top of the climb had caught and passed the leaders. This picture pretty much sums up how I felt after the finish:

Once I found out that Drew had won the bunch sprint for 4th place, as one of the escapees from the original three riders was brought back in the last kilometre. I felt a bit better but was still really annoyed with myself for not going with the move on the hill. According to Mr Felix English it's probably that I 'should just be less of a pussy' and shouldn't be scared about making a gamble or hurting myself early on in the race. For once I actually agree with him and I think I was 'such a pussy' in the race because after last season, where I was pretty much obese, my main objective would always be to stay with the bunch as long as I could and avoid wasting unnecessary energy where possible. Whereas this year I've actually done some training so can allow myself to use more energy early on getting into to breaks and making gambles in attacks etc.

Drew won the bunch sprint for 4th

Next weekend is the big one, first round of the Junior Nat Series. The Cadence Road Race, which I am looking at on google street view at the current time of writing and it appears that it is the same circuit this year as the one I did on the first road stage of the Ras De Cymru last June/July. As I remember the lap is not too bad but had one quite hard climb in it every time round, which the race subsequently finishes up, so that should be interesting. That is providing I'm healthy. I woke up this morning with a saw throat which I was not too happy about and I'm now filling my body with vitamin c to make sure it doesn't get any worse before the highly prestigious first classic of the season in Ital... Wales. Cadence that is, not Milan-San Remo.

Frant-Lamberhurst ONE, Brock Duncumb Rogers NIL

This Sunday marked the start of the 2011 season proper for me at the E,1,2,3 Serrl Summer Series 1 event on the Lamberhurst-Frant course, 6 laps of the fairly long 20km course which incuded quite a lot of climbing. Although I've already ridden a few other races this year, I believe that this is where the season officially starts for our team as from here on in we are racing pretty much every weekend all the way through until next autumn. We had a good turn out with 7 team riders attending which turned out to us having just fewer than 20% of the whole field, as there were only 40 riders on the start line. However, even before the race we knew that we were unlikely to dominate as there were lots of very strong elites and 1st cats including former In Gear Development Squad rider Tom Copeland.

The race started at a fairly comfortable pace and continued this way for just over a lap, at which point all hell broke loose on one of the steeper climbs of the circuit and and attacks started flying from all directions. Fortunately the tactical mastermind known as the 'Cycling Teacher' (http://willkempcycling.blogspot.com/) had predicted pre-race that this would happen on this exact climb on this lap and this meant that our team was ready. Team mate Matt 'Northern Star' Pilkington was already up the road as the attacks started to fly and despite our teams best efforts to block, we filled the front of the bunch with 5 orange jerseys spread across the road, there were lots of riders getting a gap up the climb and across to him. At this point I decided to follow the attacks and went pretty hard up the climb. When I got over the top I looked behind and saw team mate Drew Holmes right on my wheel and then behind him a massive gap. This was the decisive split which the 'Cycling Teacher' had predicted with the original main bunch splitting into two groups of 20. We had 3 riders in the front group of 20; myself, Drew and Matt. Towards the end of the second lap our group started to fracture with small groups of twos and threes going away. At this point I was still feeling strong but as I had never been in this position of being in the break in a big man's race before, largely due to my bulky body weight last season and lack of superior leg muscles, I decided to hold back as we were only on the second lap of six. 8 riders ended up going away and we could tell straight away that we were not going to be seeing these guys again today as their group consisted of all the stronglads.

The second group with; me, Drew, Matt and 5 others riders continued to do through and off for a couple of more laps. Although, I don't think many of the 'older generation' of riders in our group, guys that were even older than Matt and Will (I know I didn't think it possible either), actually understood what this was as they continued to bark at us to go through and off even though that was what we had been doing for the last 30 miles! They also seemed incapable of understanding, despite being told many times, that me and the other junior in the group Lawrence Carpenter couldn't come through on descents because of our little junior gears.

Drew had been suffering for a number of laps and with 2 laps to go he got dropped from our group on the finish climb. A couple of other guys had been dropped the lap before and our group was now down to 9 riders. At this point I was feeling really strong but then suddenly with about one and a half laps to go I blew up big time. This ultimately ended up in me getting dropped up one of the larger climbs towards the end of the circuit and finishing the end of that lap very very slowly before hanging up my wheels for the day. I was really angry with myself, and also surprised, as I had gone from feeling like one of the stronger riders in the group to being completely spent within the space of half a lap. I hoping that this is because this is my first long race of the season and that my body isn't ready to make such a big effort for such a long period of time yet.

Matt ended up being the first rider from our group which ended up being 9th overall so at least the team came away with a result and it made up some consolation for me as I had done quite a lot of work in our group enabling Matt to sit on the back and rest his legs at some points.

The most important thing I learnt from today's race is that... My new Reynolds are sweeeeeeet. They felt fast and super smooth and the race photographer obviously noticed this to as he took a photo of me which showed my new wheels looking first class.

Savage Weekend

I’ve been neglecting my blog over the last two weeks due to fun fun fun A Level revision and exams, however, as of yesterday I am free from exams for at least 3 months. Lucky me.

This weekend myself and my team had yet another busy weekend of riding on the cards. It started with a Hillingdon Winter Series on Saturday, winter being the focal word of this sentence with it feeling like it was at least -20 degrees on the day. It was the first race of the year in which the whole team attended so despite the cold weather everyone was fired up to start the season with a bang. The only riders who couldn’t make it were Jack OB and George Pearle, who are both experiencing ongoing illness, and Will Kemp, who had teaching commitments to attend to.

LEWNOZ set the standard high coming 2^nd in the 4 cat race with Tom Redwood also putting in a solid performance, although he unfortunately ended up getting boxed in the gallop.  Everybody else was riding in the E,1,2,3s and in the first half of the race there were quite a few moves with our riders in it that were dilly dallying on and off the front of the bunch. At about the half way point the significant move of the day went, with 8 riders in it, and we had ‘northern star’ Matt Pilkington comfortably in the mix. The rest of the team blocked and chased down attacks when necessary but after only about 15 minutes it became apparent that the break was not going to see the bunch again for the rest of the race. Matt ended up getting a well deserved second place missing out on a win by less than wheels length to Orbea rider Lewis Atkins.

It was a far more successful first race of the year than last year’s as I am told, as I was not in the team then, that most of the team ended up on the floor at this event last time around.

Sunday meant an early start to meet at the Triangle in Burgess Hill for 8:15am for the routine team training session. However, this week it was not so routine as we were being photographed before and during the ride by a professional photographer and were told that the pictures would appear in Cycling Weekly as well some other magazines. So look out for a ‘wall of orange’, as some other riders have started calling us, in cycle magazines over the next few weeks to. The ride was not the usual route either, as we embarked on a trip to Beachy Head and back to take in a more ‘scenic’ route for the photographer. Once we reached Beachy Head we met youth team mate Sara who then joined us for the trip back. By the end we did 76 miles which took little over 4 hours.

After getting out of our kit and in to people clothes we then headed for some lunch and then for a Seminar from team manager, Dan Bennett. After talking about the ride today and yesterday’s race we were shown the 99% finished team calender for the year and from what I saw nearly everyone seemed as excited as me about it. By the looks of it were in for a tough year but with a stronger team than last year, due to progression from riders as well as a few new signings, we are hopeful for some very good results indeed.

My training has been going pretty well since my ‘man flu’ at the beginning of January and I am on my 3^rd week of training from coach, Stuart Blunt, since then. In just over a week’s time is my first road race of the season which is the Perfs Pedal Race. It’s looking like we’re going to have five riders  from the team for the race so hopefully we can get a good result to continue the team’s decent early season form.

First weekend back on the bike

This weekend I was back on my bike after being ill and after initially expecting to be going like a sack of potatoes it actually turned out that I hadn't lost all that much form. Obviously will take a week or two to get back to where I was but still I was feeling nowhere near as bad as I was expecting!

On Saturday the team had a Newport session planned for the evening which meant I could have a lie in Saturday morning before the mind numbing travel up to welshland. Fortunately it proved not to be too bad as I had the very entertaining company of Will Kemp and Drew and Trevor Holmes in the team van. The session went pretty well and it was clear that Will was the strongest even though he probably lost about 80% of the power he put through the pedals by being rather, to put it politely, 'unsmooth'. It was good to see all the guys who were only riding the track for the second time, and Tom Redwood who was riding it for the first time, getting stuck in and apart from the odd hairy moment it all went really well. On the way home Trevor took us to for a cheeky sweet chilli chicken deli in a certain dubious restaurant with golden arches, but it turned out to be the perfect recovery food, probably because it was either that or go hungry though.

Despite the bad looking weather prediction from Will Kemp's mate who apparently is always 'hot on the weather' it turned out to be a pretty nice day for a ride today. It was one of the first days in over a month that it was actually good cycling conditions, and you could tell as there were loads of riders out on the roads today. I set off aiming to meet team mates Tom Laker , Drew Holmes, Will Kemp and also Sigma rider Tom Copeland in Ditchling for 10:30. However, my ride started pretty badly as after only 10 minutes riding the rear derailleur snapped off on my winter bike. Luckily my dad wasn't doing anything this morning as was able to drive me over my race bike which brought me a lot of stick from the other riders for 'riding carbon on the roads in January' but to be honest I didn't have much choice. Once we had met in Ditchling Tom C lead us along to Ditchling Beacon which we preceded to climb. Will Kemp decided that he wasn't even going to try to follow Tom C's hot pace, from what I've heard Will has been riding with Tom a lot lately so clearly knew all about the pain that was in store for us who tried to follow. Drew lost the wheels about half way up and I was dispatched about three quarters of the way up which I was pretty happy about to be honest after being ill. Tom L did a solid job and stayed with Tom C all the way to the top of the climb and he seemed to do it fairly comfortably, it must be something about the name.
After this Tom C tested our physical and technical skills all the way to Lewes where we met the McNamara Brothers, Paul Barnard and a few others for a few more hours of pain. After this Tom L, Drew and myself decided it was time for a coffee stop and the others kept going as the likes of Will and Tom C were planning on doing 5/6 hours, whereas us youg'uns only had four ours set by our separate coaches. After our Coffee we started heading back and after about 15 minutes I departed from Tom and Drew to face the very slow crawl home back to Brighton against the huge headwind. By the time I got home I was WRECKED but was pretty happy with my first weekend back on the bike and I'm looking forward to getting back on a training plan for some more pain.

Here are some photos of our ride courtesy of The Cycling Teacher (Will Kemp) who most inappropriately decided it would by a good idea to start taking pictures on his phone on the section of road with the strongest cross winds. Nice one Will.

Photos of the Newport Session will be up soon.

Road bike 2011

As promised yesterday here are pictures of my road bike, complete with new wheels, for this season.



Frame: Specialized Tarmac SL

Groupset: Shimano Ultegra 6700

Race Wheels: Reynolds Assault 2010
Tyres: Continental Sprinter Tubular Tyres
Seatpost: Some Carbon Ting From The Depths Of The Garage
Saddle: Fizik Arione

Handle Bars: 3T Rotundo Pro

Bar Tape: Black Fizik Microtex Soft Touch With Logo

Stem: ITM Millenium

Headset: Cane Creek

Cranks: FSA Carbon Pro Team Issue

Computer: Blackburn Delphi 4.0

Pedal: SPD SL (the shit model)

Omg Omg Omg Omg I have NEW WHEEEEELS (and a huge debt)

Initially I was going to name this post 'Christmas Again' like team mate Charlie Fawke did when his new wheels turned up yesterday, but then I thought actually I am going to be moneyless and in debt to 'mummy and daddy' for the next few months because of these damn, but still wonderful, beautiful and magnificent, wheels. Anyway, these are the wheels:

I will put pictures of my completed road bike for this season up tomorrow.