Blogs
Tue, 1 Mar 2011
A good start to the new year!
By Joanna Rowsell - Horizon Fitness Racing Team
After a fairly disruptive year in 2010 I am keen to make 2011 better! I went away to Spain over Christmas for 2 weeks of training in the sun and I’m really glad I made this decision as the day I flew there was a load more snow in the UK and long training rides on the road would have been impossible! This training block set me up well for Team Pursuit training in the New Year. I felt fit and raring to go!
The focus of my training is on the World Championships which are at the end of March in Holland. Before this, however, we had the final round of the World Cup at home in Manchester on 18th February! Every winter there are a series of 4 World Cups around the World. These act as qualification events for the World Championships but are also prestigious events in themselves. This winter these events also carried Olympic qualification points, making them even more important!
This winter I hadn’t ridden any of the World Cups having been ill and injured (as detailed in my previous 2 blogs) so I was very excited about the prospect of racing in Manchester with the support of the home crowd! Preparation had been going well and we began talking about what time we could do. I was riding with Wendy Houvenaghel, who has been part of the Team Pursuit with me both times we won the World Title, and Sarah Storey, who is going to be my team mate on the road this year with Horizon Fitness RT – Prendas Ciclismo, but it was our first time riding a Team Pursuit together!
Our qualifying ride was early afternoon on Friday and we were off 17th out of 22 teams entered. We knew we had to post a fast time as we didn’t know what the remaining 5 teams would do. My job is to do the start from the gate (known as Man 1) and get the team up to speed in the first lap, and then do my best to maintain the pace throughout the race in my remaining turns on the front. The qualifying ride went well and the roar from the crowd got louder and louder every lap! I could even hear the commentator saying we were the fastest team so far as we went through the 2k mark! We finished the ride with a time of 3:20.962 which was a new National Record by 0.9s and a new sea level World Record!!! I was really pleased with the time and really pleased with my ride, also confident that I would have more to come in the final.
Now we just had to wait for the remaining 5 teams to ride to see if our time would be beaten!!!
Our time remained more than 2 seconds quicker than any other team until 1 team to go – the final heat of the New Zealand team, who had previously held the sea level World Record. We knew we would make the Gold medal ride off as the fastest team so far with just the one team to go, but still were keen to see how fast they would ride! As they rode their splits came up on the scoreboard and we waited as they went slightly up on our time, then slightly down, then slightly up again, before finally finishing with a time of 3:20.988, which was 0.026s slower than us!!
This meant we were through to the final as fastest qualifiers! The final was a few hours later so we had time to recover from our first ride and I was feeling excited for the final! The crowd really got behind us and as soon as we started the noise was phenomenal! During the ride we can’t see the other team on the opposite side of the track but the crowd were making so much noise I thought we must be doing well! The ride felt fast and we finished with an amazing time of 3:19.757, beating the New Zealand team by over a second, and only missing out on the World Record set by the American’s at altitude by 0.188s!!!
I was so pleased to break the 3:20 barrier! We had ridden a new sea level World Record and the 2nd fastest time ever. A few laps waving to the crowd and it was then straight into the media pen for an interview with the BBC, which is somewhat difficult when you have just ridden a team pursuit and are still out of breath! We were GB’s first Gold Medal at the World Cup and following the podium we had more interviews and then autograph signing. Manchester World Cup is such an amazing event and the crowd are so supportive, so it was a pleasure to do this.
The next day it was straight back down to Earth and out riding my bike in the rain! The World Championships are only a month away so there is no time to back off the training. I still went to the track in the evenings to support my other GB team mates for the remaining two days of racing which was great fun.
I am now in Majorca for one last block of road training before the final preparations for the Worlds. So far the weather has been gorgeous and over 20 degrees, which makes a nice change from home! Let’s hope it stays that way for the rest of the camp!
Joanna
For more information on the Horizon Fitness Racing Team, visit www.onthedrops.com.