Iona at Peterborough Crit

Iona at Peterborough Crit

Monday 11 November 2013

Parlez-vous anglais?

I had been hoping to compete in my first UCI time trial back in June; the Celtic Chrono has previously attracted some top female riders and was meant to take place on 16th June so my plan had been to use it as a warm up for the British National TT.  Unfortunately this year’s event was cancelled due to a lack of funding.

Thus my first UCI race was the Chrono Champenois in mid-September. The women’s event is a UCI 1.1 and takes place in Betheny, near Reims in Northeast France, the week before the Worlds.

Mark and I set off bright and early on Saturday 14th September to get the tunnel over to Calais.  The drive from Calais to Betheny was ~3 hours so we made it to sign-on mid-afternoon with plenty of time to look at the course.  Unfortunately our laughable grasp of French meant that communicating with the staff in HQ was impossible, luckily the NZ coach was on hand to help us find out what hotel we were staying in (hotels for UCI races are normally booked by the organizer so I had no idea where we would be sleeping)! I had planned to ride the course but the bad weather dictated that we would just drive it.  I made a film on our second lap to review in the hotel as the long course (one single 33.5km loop) meant that there were a lot of turns to remember.

Although we had the name and address of our hotel, checking in was more complicated than it should have been (not helped by our language skills!).  The first hotel claimed that they were full and sent us down the road to a different hotel.  After being sent to-and-fro a few times we started to worry that we would be sleeping in the car.  Luckily at that point the organizer showed up and arranged a room for us.

The next morning we woke to glorious sunshine and headed down to the HQ nice and early.  Mark had a DS meeting at 10am so I went out for a short spin to look at the first section of the course and get a feel for wind direction etc.  The meeting was entirely in French but he managed to get the crucial information from the Australian and New Zealand coaches.  I wasn’t racing until after 2pm so I had a relaxing morning sitting in the car in the sunshine.  I signed a few autographs and had a couple of photos with local children (being a cyclist is like being a minor celebrity in France) and generally tried to relax.  The Aussie team parked next to us and set up their array of Scott TT and road bikes (for warming up on).  Basically, it made my set-up look horribly amateur:


I got decidedly nervous during warm-up and then spent most of my 15 minutes in the holding pen feeling pretty sick.  Mark had headed to the car ready to follow me onto the course so I had nothing but by own thoughts to distract me.  We had worked out a series of car horn signals (not quite as pro as having a radio) so that Mark could communicate with me if I needed to look up/speed up or if I was catching someone/being caught.  Once on the start ramp my nerves were replaced by determination and I attacked the race right from the word go.  I thought I raced well, from my overall power to my line choices and cornering.  Mark was impressed too, which is high praise! He has never followed me in the car before so I think it was interesting for him to actually watch me race.

My following car!

I was a little disappointed that I ended up finishing 17th – I thought that I would have placed a bit higher.  Still, I was pleased with my ride and how close I was to some big names – I was definitely in the mix! Also, I felt like the experience of riding such a big event would help the next time I raced a UCI event, certainly in terms of my nerves!

The race was won by Ellen van Dijk, who had a margin of nearly 2 minutes over Carmen Small and Shara Gillow.  Van Dijk obviously then went on to win the World TT Championships the following week, with Small in 3rd – to be only 3 minutes behind a World TT bronze medalist over a 33km course proved that with a little bit more work I can be competitive in these events (incidentally, I finished only 10 seconds behind the Swiss athlete who placed 21st at Worlds).

In between Chrono Champenois and Chrono des Nations I rode the Individual Pursuit at the National Track Championships.  My form was good heading into it but I made the stupid mistake of arranging to socialize the week before the event.  This resulted in me catching a cold.  I did everything I could to recover quickly and by the Wednesday (the day before the IP) I thought I was better.  Unfortunately though it seems I was not quite over it and by the 2km mark of my race I was really struggling to breathe – it seems there is nothing like a 3km max effort to see whether you have recovered from an illness or not! I still managed a time of 3.54, which is a 1 second PB, but in all honesty I felt like I was capable of much more had I been at full fitness.

After the track I had just over 3 weeks to fully recover and make further improvements before Chrono des Nations.  My training reached a new level of brutality but I was hitting the best numbers I’ve ever reached over all durations.  When the start sheet was released a few days before the event it was fairly intimidating, featuring the best of the UK time trailing scene along with top pros including Olga Zabelinskaia, Amber Neben, Elisa Longo Borghini and the ever-green French time triallist Jeannie Longo.  I knew it was going to be a tough race but I was determined to do my best and see how close I could get to the professionals!

The journey to Les Herbiers was long (it was a 6 hour drive from Calais) and we struggled to find the HQ for registration when we arrived as the road closures were already in place (again our non-existent French let us down quite a lot!).  After driving around the town for about an hour we saw a team car go around a road-closure barrier.  We followed it through and, to our relief, found ourselves in the start/finish area where sign on was happening.  Luckily the commissaires spoke good English and gave us an official-looking piece of paper with the name of our hotel on it (no repeat of Chrono Champenois thank goodness!).  The plan was to drive the course twice, before riding it on the TT bike to get a feel for the corners.  The course was continually rolling with some fairly tough uphill drags and a couple of terrifyingly quick descents.  I prayed for a dry race-day as I really didn’t want to have to tackle some sections of the course in the wet.  When I rode the course with Mark following in the car I realized that the wind might also make life difficult during the race – the only front wheel options I had with me were my Zipp 808 and a box-section training wheel – like hell was I using a box-section in a UCI race!  During my practice run I was using my race wheels to get as accurate an idea as possible of the likely race conditions – it turned out that these were “very windy”! At times I felt like I was being blown all over the road by the cross-wind and the downhill sections were especially scary.  I hoped that the wind would ease a little over night but knew that I would have a challenging race ahead of me if it didn’t…

The following morning was sunny, though it had clearly rained heavily during the night.  We packed up the car after breakfast and headed back to the race area (which was only 1.5 km away – our hotel was actually on the course).  The atmosphere when we arrived was crazy! There seemed to be people everywhere and members of the public were walking around, hoping to get autographs from their favourite cyclists.  I was asked several times if I had any signed photo postcards and was met with disappointed looks when I said that I didn’t – clearly I will have to get some made if I go back to Chrono des Nations next year! When Mark started setting up my bike he noticed that my back wheel had gone completely flat overnight having been fully inflated the previous afternoon – I had a slow puncture.  Then followed the fastest tub change I have ever seen in my life.  Off came the old tub, the remnants of glue were removed with ethanol and hexane (being a Chemistry PhD student has its uses) and on went a new tub, secured with tub-tape.  I would have been stressed about the whole matter but I didn’t have time as the change was so quick!

GB Cycles car ready to go!

 Slightly more branded other team cars!

The only other thing to worry about was the bike check.  I hadn’t changed anything on the bike since Chrono Champenois but the bike check there was so relaxed that I was still worried about it.  It turned out that my saddle was pointing down by 0.5° too much and so I had to take the bike back to Mark to adjust it.  I ended up going back and fourth three times before the bike checker finally okayed my bike.

It was soon time to warm up on the turbo and once I’m in to my routine the time seems to fly by.  Before I knew it I was on the start ramp listening for the beeps and waiting to be set off.  The roads had completely dried out by the time I started racing but it was definitely windy! There were sections of the course where I really struggled to control the bike but the fact that the roads were completely closed meant I wasn’t going to be blown into the course of an oncoming vehicle – always a bonus. Overall I think I handled the conditions well, only coming out of the tribars (other than in the sharp corners) on one double bend that looked exposed.  Mark and I had decided to use the same car-horn signals as at Chrono Champenois.  However, whilst he was fairly quiet there he decided to employ liberal use of the horn at this race.  It felt like every 5 minutes I was getting a double beep for “speed up”.  At times I genuinely wanted to take my hands off the bars and make a rude gesture but I obviously didn’t! It worked though – I crossed the line (after a near miss with a cat who was leisurely crossing the finishing straight) in 30.46, under the 31-minute mark that Mark and I had talked about.  In previous years a sub-31 would almost guarantee a top 10 finish and so this was the time I was aiming for.  Unfortunately, not this year.  The caliber of riders competing meant that my 30.46 was only good enough for 19th.  One definite positive was that I finished just 20 seconds behind Julia Shaw (I said going into the event that I would be happy to finish within a minute of her and so I was definitely pleased to be so close).  I was also only 1’21 behind Zabelinskaia, Olympic bronze medalist – there are obviously still improvements to be made but I’m not a million miles away!


Hopefully I will be able to return to both Chrono Champenois and Chrono des Nations next year and improve on my performances from this year.  I think that the main area in both races where I was losing time on the pros was on the uphill sections and I hope to be much leaner next season, which will definitely help with this.  I really enjoyed the experience of racing on closed roads in a country that welcomes cyclists – bring on more French racing next year!!