Houffalize
The start of the womens world cup race
Macca
Me going a little close to the padding
Hendo through the finish straight 
Bikes in Maastricht, Nederlands
Some more sight seeing in Maastrict
(photos courtesy of Warren Burgess)
The Houffalize World Cup with its challenging course, huge field and even huger crowd was a real
eye opener, no wonder it has established itself as a "classic" mountain bike race.
The race consisted of a start lap followed by 5 laps of the course proper. The course had over 300m of climbing per lap...that is heaps, probably double the average course back home. Fortunately there were plenty of really fun descents, but they always seemed to be over so quickly. There is definitely no place to hide here.
The start lap smashed up a very steep bit(ch)umen climb for roughly 2.5 minutes. I started from 92nd in the field of about 220 and found myself getting caught up by a couple of crashes early on. I tried to dose my effort up this climb because i was worried about the rest of the race, but i think i should have pushed harder because i did not maintain my position and ended up closer to 200th by the first descent. The traffic was the worst i have ever seen, several times there were huge bottlenecks that caused absolute chaos, a real nightmare. Needless to say i lost a fair bit of time and had a lot of work to do. I had a pep talk from Wazza Burgess (from KOM) after Offenburg and he told me i needed more mongrel, and that i had to stop riding like a gentlemen. I tried my best to be an arsehole and it worked a few times, on one steep downhill i saw a different line down the side and managed to snake about 10 guys. By the second lap i felt like i was back in control of my own race and riding a good tempo. I managed to pulled back a quite a few spots but it was a real suffer-fest. I thought i had paced myself pretty well and was not going to get pulled, but with one lap to go the dreaded 80% red flag came out meaning that my race was over. I was 152nd.
I was not really happy to get pulled twice in a row after such a good first round. Oh well. After 7 weekends of consecutive racing i am happy to be having this weekend off. I think i know what i have to work on so it'll give me a chance to get out and do some hard training. Clarkey wants Ben and i to get into a bit of motor pacing to build our speed, so we'll have to be super nice to Rosie so she will drive for us! We are now back in Germany staying right near the Rhine so we should be able to find a nice flat road where we can wind up the 44-11 behind the Kangoo.
No comments:
Post a Comment