It seemed like a ridiculously early start to the season with the first British Series race in March – there’s a winter race at Innerleithen next week. This I think came as a surprise to many but I was looking forward to kicking this of in Wales at one of the coolest venues I’ve been to in a long way. Deserted about 50 years ago the previous mining settlement secluded at the bottom of a steep, mountain shadowed bay is now a holiday get away with sandy beaches and a definite Welsh presence felt. The steep sided hills made for some fast uplifts as well as a difficult top section which seemed to mellow out into a gradient free 40 second sprint. This I had not prepared for and will need to work on. 20-30 second interval training doesn’t quite make you ready for such a long sprint. The sprint in South Africa is meant to be longer so I’m going to have a fun 3 weeks or training.
A huge Elite field of over 40 riders was present with all your top UK riders present as well as a number of foreign riders who seem to be seeing the huge improvement in the UK race scene with big prize money and a lot of media hype associated with it.
I travelled down from Edinburgh with Joe Taylor and Sam Herd and stayed with Emyr Davies who managed to pringle his wheel is a spectacular fashion in the middle rock section. Thanks for the bed Ems!
With the track being tight, awkward and pretty wet the 6 runs I put in on Saturday began to help me get familiar with the track. Come Sunday the weather had closed in a lot; fog, wind and rain welcomed us. I put in one practice and planned to use seeding as a gauger on how to race the track. Whether to push it hard at the top or just keep it smooth was difficult. Unfortunately a number of injuries meant that the seeding runs were cancelled and it was straight into race runs for me. I’m sure a few of the riders who had raced here 3 weeks previously were quite happy about this call.
I had a terrible start to my run crashing on the first left hander after a couple of calls from spectators seemed to put me off a little. I tried to push it and then decked it again on a left hand which had a drop in the middle of the apex and my front wheel dropped of the edge of some shoring. I composed myself and went for the ‘smooth’ approach. Managing to get the next section smooth and fast I was really pleased with my riding through there. My entry into the flat section wasn’t great and I t-boned a critical corner but got on the pedals and came through the line. I finished up 26th which I was considering my run pleased about.
I am now heading out to Spain with Ben and Fraser from the MTBcut team for 2 weeks of training and then jet off to South Africa for the 1st round of the World Cup series.
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