Another weekend racing bikes for the awesome www.facebook.com/revolutionbikeparkracing
team. Here's the lowdown from the showdown...
Last year's BDS at Bala was a tale of 2 halves.
Saturday was the best day I had on a bike in 2015. The sun shone, the track was
insanely brilliant, dry & dusty, & everything was pretty close to
perfect. Then, overnight the rains came. All that lovely dust turned to claggy
mud & the woods became pretty much unrideable for quite a few of us. In my
race run I washed out on the entry to one of the bus stops & smashed my
hand into a wall & then crashed a further 3 times on the way down. I came
last in my category. It was abysmal, my worst day on a bike all year.
With a decent weather forecast all weekend this
year, I was keen to get back & have another crack at it. I've been doing
some coaching with Jack Reading
over the last couple of weeks, trying to improve my riding & get faster.
I've only done a couple of sessions so far but I saw some instant improvements.
Time wise, last weekend's result was the best I've ever had, the closest in %
terms that I've ever finished to both the fastest Elite rider & my category
winner.
On Friday night Jack let me jump on his track walk
which was really helpful & the track looked mega. It starts off with a
motorway type section with a series of bus stops leading into a jumps/rhythm
section, then there's the woods which are tight & twisty, then it opens out
where the trees have been felled & it's flatter & faster again before
the flat out bottom section through the fields & down to the finish arena.
It's definitely one of the best tracks we've raced.
After a few mechanicals at the start, Saturday was
just another amazing day on a bike. Think I managed 7 runs, Binnsy did 9 & we
managed to hit all but 2 of the jumps on the top section. One of them we were
never going to do, way too big for us, but the other one we really wanted to
have a crack at but it was tricky to get into & we couldn't get a run
together where we cleared the jump before it & got the berm after that
right. We'd try again on Sunday. We had the rest of the track pretty dialled.
Both buzzing.
After a ghetto shower with a jet wash & some
shampoo; tea & a few pints in the local boozer & another night sleeping
in the van, Sunday came round & it was hot, hot, hot at 9am as we started
practice. We intended to do one warm up run, then one full run where we'd hit
everything except the biggest double & that would be perfect. Except things
don't quite work out how you plan & that 2nd run was the worst run of the
weekend for both of us, so we rushed back up & did another before practice
ended. Squeezing that 3rd run in meant there was no time for hanging around
& we were straight up for our seeding run. Binnsy off first & he put in
a 4:17 which placed him first in Grand Vets, 3 seconds ahead of his big rival,
current Grand Vet National Champion Steve Felstead. I messed up my top section
but then rode pretty well. By the time I was in the woods I'd caught the rider
who'd set off 30 seconds in front of me & I seeded 13th/18 in vets with a
4:34.
If I pushed it Binnsy thought I should be able to
do a 4:20 in my race run so I decided that I was going to give it everything
& try for that as it could possibly jump me up to 10th. Now we were seeded
properly I shouldn't catch the rider in front & I just had to get the top
section right.
I nailed the top section. Hit all my jumps, hit
all my lines, pedalled through all the bits I'd previously been pumping & I'd
probably already pulled 5-10 seconds back. I got a bit carried away though,
full red mist & I hit the entry to the woods far too quickly & the next
thing I knew my face was heading for a fence pole. How quickly it can all come
crashing down. Not the fence pole btw, that remained steadfast in the ground, I
mean the race run :) So that's that, everyone else put in a clean one
& I left Bala with another crap result.
It's not all bad though. Last year I left this
race feeling like I was the worst rider on the hill. I was just trying to get
down. This year I went out chasing a top 10 finish, pushing hard, getting over
the front of the bike & riding aggressively & I know I'm riding loads
better than this time last year.
Binnsy couldn't quite put it together in his race
run either. He made a mistake that cost him 3 seconds & relegated him to
2nd. Also gutted. Cheered ourselves up by spending the rest of the afternoon
sat in the sun watching the Elites come down whilst having a couple of beers
with James
& #datbitchfromrevo Susha :)
Congrats to Binnsy on his podium, but massive
congrats to to our team rider Riley Scott who took his
first podium at National level in Youth. Good skills all round.
Thanks to the rest of the team & all the
marshals etc for another amazing weekend racing bikes & to the guys at www.facebook.com/rideio/
& www.facebook.com/SilverlineTools1
for sorting my bike out on Saturday morning.
Right, after racing 3 weekends in a row we've now
got a few weeks off to regroup before the 2nd half of the season. Maybe next
weekend I'll want to have a look round some shops or something. Oh, did someone
say Fort William World Cup? :)
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