Wednesday 6 June 2018

May, the easy month

After Rutland I took a little break from training for a week to recover from a hard start to the season and fully recover from the cold I had picked up while in Morocco. May was a perfect time to do this with only 3 UCI race days in the month and 2 of them were on the last weekend of the month. After my week off I started upping my training again and doing double days with mid week races on the evening. With 2 weeks of solid training in the legs it was time to head to Sweden for the Scandinavian Race in  Uppsala UCI 1.2. The team rode to the plan and it didn't pay off, tactically we messed up and had not back up plan. So the main thing we took from this race was experience and turned the negatives into learning. Still it was good to be back racing and helping the team out. My legs felt good after the rest and training. I knew I had a good 10 day block of training between Sweden and Estonia so when I got home I continued training well and getting into better shape for Estonia.
Tour of Estonia UCI 2.1 a 2 day race with the first stage 215km from Tallinn to Tartu then stage 2 a 175km 18 lap circuit around Tartu. Stage 1 the plan was to be in all the moves and aim for kom points sprint points and a result. The team and myself managed to make this happen with us always active and following moves for the full stage. I managed to get away solo and take the first sprint of the day which got me 3 bonus seconds. Then the race was full gas from there with splits happening then it coming back together. The stage final ended in a bunch sprint where Tipper managed to get 10th. With the bonus seconds I picked up it meant going into stage 2 I was 5th on GC. Stage 2 didn't go to plan missing the final split that was the winning split. Earlier in the race Pierre made the first break for the team and then as that was brought back I got in the next move which was a strong one with around 16 guys. This move got a maximum of 3 mintues before finally getting brought back with 60km to go. Once it was all back together the pace was kept on to prevent other attacks going. With only one other team mate in the race by this point it was hard to sit up near the front as it was all full teams lined out and they weren't letting us in. We tried fighting to stay up there but it was mentally and physically hard so we sat back and the lap after we did that the race split and around 14 guys ended up going clear. Then 3 clipped off from my group before I got away in the final kilometers. I ended up 19th on the stage and 17th overall in the race. Very gutted not to top 10 or even top 5 after the day before but still 17th on GC at UCI .1 level isn't too bad.
That sums up May. I started June with a National B road race up in Scotland as it's a bit more fun and harder racing than training on your own. The race started off very fast will many attacks. After 10km there was a break of 5 up the road. The bunch just kept attacking each other the rest of the race until 30km to go when the bunch finally split and it was 10 guys that actually wanted to race and try to get the break back. On the final climb I went into it first and started riding up it hard to keep the pace up. I looked back and I had gaped the group I was with so I pressed on and rode across to the break on my own. The break had split with one rider up the road and the 4 I had caught, 1 more rider got across later and I tried to get the group working as the chase group was between 30 seconds to a minute behind. There was 3 Ribble in the group and they had a team mate away who wasn't getting caught by the finish yet they weren't fully committed to work to hold of the chasers. We ended up holding off the chasers and I messed up the finish going into the last corner last man and the finish wasn't far out of that final corner I managed to get 4th in the race. I was a good day out with plenty of hard efforts, great training for races to come.
In June I have 3 UCI 1.1's, National TT Champs and National Road Race Champs.

No comments:

Post a Comment