Blogs
Fri, 4 Jun 2010
National 25 Preview
By Sarah Storey - Horizon Fitness Racing Team
Tomorrow sees me attack my final TT event for a few weeks, in the National 25 mile Time Trial Championships.
Being held up in Yorkshire; with the HQ in Boroughbridge, the start a few miles north, and the entire race being battled out on a retrace course along the A168, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in and seeing what I am made of over the longer distance!
The pre-race discussion and the event info have suggested the course is a sporting course, hillier than a normal championship course. A course recce today has not convinced me of its hilly nature; although it isn't a dual carriageway course, there are quite as many ups as I would have liked! I still think we need a championship course that has a steeper than 10% climb in it, and therefore tests the testers ability to flick the front changer as well as the rear! However, tomorrow's course does have a few draggy sections to make life interesting, and despite these, I'm hoping to improve on the time that earned me a silver medal last year, 57.13.
The start is a short rise northwest to the first roundabout, and then the course heads south for around 20km. Rolling in nature with 4 further roundabouts, before the retrace point close to Kirk Deighton at the Wetherby end of the course. After this, the route simply retraces north over the 4 roundabouts of the A168, before the finish appears around half a mile before the roundabout we started out from at the start of the race.
Today's recce suggested 69 metres of climbing in the first half of the ride, and 65 metres of climbing on the way homel; not really much to get excited about! The course is on a road parallel to the A1[M] so hopefully this will help keep traffic levels down, and with good sight lines at all the roundabouts, there should be plenty of time to adjust the speed to miss any traffic on these sections.
All in all, it looks like a great course and has the promise for some deceptively fast times. With my race plan firmly established, I'm spending the last few hours resting in the grounds of Goldsborough Hall, a formal royal residence, about 12km south of the HQ. It's a tough life being a bike rider, but someone has to do it!
Wish me luck! :-)
For more information about the Horizon Fitness Racing Team, visit www.onthedrops.com.