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:
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!!
