Easy week, that’s
what it said on my training plan, indicating the first week of a training
block. My first two races of the season were to be at the end of this week so I
was glad I’d be coming into them relatively fresh. However, it may have been a moderately
light training week but away from the bike it turned out to be anything but
easy.
My first two
races were time trials so I already knew we would have to endure the annual
faff-fest that is building up the TT bike, however this year it was worse than
usual. The final parts didn’t show up until Wednesday night and my other half
and two of his friends then spent all of Thursday and even more time on Friday
afternoon building up the bike (thanks guys). The vast majority of this was spent fighting with the
horrendous internal cable routing on my new Cervelo P4. The bike was finished
mid-afternoon on Friday and I had time for a quick spin before dark in
preparation for its first race the next day – highly non-ideal. It was worth all
the agony though as the bike looks fantastic and is great to ride.
Had this been the
only obstacle of the week it would have been fine but I also had my first year
PhD viva and my car decided that this week was an appropriate time to fail its
M.O.T. Stressing about the latter led to being under-revised for the former,
however I got through relatively unscathed. All in all a week with a lot of
stress and very little sleep: just the preparation you want before opening your
season.
I kicked things
off at the CC Breckland 10 mile time trial on Saturday. I’d done this event last
year and won the ladies prize so I was aiming for a repeat performance. I really like the course this
race is on and despite only having had 45 minutes to get use to a completely
new TT bike and new TT position the day before I soon got into a good rhythm
(photographic evidence below). I was comfortably the fastest lady and was 19
secs quicker than the previous year. I was a little unhappy to not go quicker
as I know from my training data that I’ve made big improvements since this time
last year, however I put this down to my relative unfamiliarity with the bike.
Sunday was the
Cambridge University Cycling Club championship (Cuppers) 10 m TT. I’ve won this
event for the last two years and it was on a course I ride very regularly so l
hoped this would provide a better marker of how I was going on the TT
bike. I was clearly getting more
use to the bike as I put in a 24.37 (it isn’t a flat course) which is only a
few seconds slower than when I took the silver medal in the British
Universities Championship on the same course last April – I was very pleased so
be going so well so early in the season. I also won the event (by nearly 6
minutes) and was fast enough for 8th in the men’s event as well.
Next up are two
circuit races this coming weekend, hopefully getting my road race bike ready
shouldn’t be such a drama.
