As anyone who has any interest in time trialing will know, the holy grail (or one of) of the ten mile time trial is that first time you break the 20 minute barrier. Its mainly a milestone because in order to go under 20 minutes you will have to average over 30 mph. And of course 19 sounds better than 20!
Anyone who has followed this blog will know that I actually broke the 20 minute barrier in my first or second ten mile time trial last year with a time of 19.13 on the Tring course F11/10. But certainly since I bought my time trial bike two years ago I have always had another 19 in the back of my mind – the club ten course, G10/42. Anyone who has ridden this course will know its certainly not a gift course, it doesn’t have a huge hill that you only go down and not back up, its not packed with lorries from the nearest port to suck you along. And its not on some pan flat airfield style drag strip. In fact, its actually quite a rolling out and back with not a vast amount of flat ground at all. Probably two years ago now was my first time on the course using my road bike with just a skin suit and some zipp wheels to help cut through the air. I managed a 22.17 that night, which wasn’t bad going, but was some way from being a fast time vs my club mates past and present best times. At that point I think the best time from a Kingston rider had been Steve Irwin with a long 20, this seemed a long long way from the level I was at!
Anyway, after buying the time trial bike I thought I would set myself the goal of doing a 19 on said course, the only person else I can see that has done that is Hutch, back in 2002! I rode this course probably 10-15 times on my TT bike in total with varying conditions and times. The best was last year with 20.18 and the worst was well over 21 mins in a gale! However last week it seemed like everything came together, good conditions, decent legs, and a bit of luck. I managed to make it to a club ten for the first time this year, arrived with a few mins to spare, had no warm up of note and then went and clocked 19.49. I think I could have gone quicker if I had not come out of position to see if I had a puncture. The point of this post really though is to show that with the right equipment, training, persistence, you can actually go a lot faster than what you may think. I never thought I would take nearly 2.5 mins off my time from 2012, but various changes to positions and what not (and a decent night) all added up finally.
My next post on time trialing hopefully will be titled ‘in pursuit of 18’ because that is what I am hoping I might be able to do this weekend coming, or possibly at the National ten champs in two weeks time…
First Season Racing 
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