Kingston Wheelers Sporting 14

Now this blog is a few years old (and incorrectly named!) there is going to start to be repetition, not only in the events, but probably in the results too, however, today was a day for some change at least, and change is good.

As you may know this course is fairly local to me and is just down in Ripley, Surrey, its two 6.8 mile circuits of a rolling course, first few miles are up a long drag called Hungry Hill Lane, its a really crap road, and to add insult to injury, the council resurfaced only parts of it about a year ago meaning its a bit like flying through turbulence, dead calm one minute, bone shaking anguish the next! Then there is a short stretch down some dual carriageway (it is a time trial afterall!!) then a couple of miles down a steady hill with decent surface before repeating yourself.

Last year I managed to win the event, however the field was fairly small and the course was pretty wet, and the wind was so strong I used an alu rim on the front with a crappy tyre rather than my 90mm deep wheel. It didn’t seem to make too much difference however and I manged to win in 31.28 from hill climb guru Tejvan Pettinger around 30 seconds back – in the back of my mind I had Wouter Sybrandy (ex sigma pro and generally an ox strong rouleur/tester!) and his course record of 30.50 in my mind, however 2014 was not the year I was going to get anywhere near that.

Fast forward to today and the weather was pretty good, a gentle tailwind p the drag and moderate temps of around 5-6 deg, enough for me to wear my summer clothing anyway (perhaps I was just braver than some!). I’ve had a fairly decent winter and though I am certainly a bit heavier this year (due to no crash dieting) I’ve not been ill at all which is crucial in maintaining the load. I’ve done a bit of TT specific stuff in the last couple of weeks and was feeling ok. I knew that this would be a tough event to win as the field was a fair bit stronger than last years – perhaps most noteworthy of the strong guys were Connal Yates (brother of Sean), Pete Tadros (who said he has been 2nd five times here!), Liam Maybank who has been putting in 20 hour weeks for longer than I care to remember, and an outside threat from Keith Lea, a fellow Paceline rider who has recently made the switch to TT’s from pure road racing.

Being former winner has some perks, last off being the main one, meaning its going to be warmer, no chance of being caught by anyone and you don’ t have to hang about at the end waiting for times! I had a decent warm up and made my way to the line – Xavier had been telling me that we don’t want to see 400w on the garmin for the first lap, and an average of around 355w would be a good result having probably averaged around 350w last year, I listened well, and then as usual the heat of the moment took over, half way through the first lap I think I’d just about averaged 400w for the first 8 or so mins and I was feeling good, I scaled back a bit to save myself from the inevitable blow up and finished lap 1 a few seconds shy of course record beating pace (26.5 mph would do it, just!) having had to take the corners pretty slowly and avoid a car hell bent on going through a huge puddle at 40mph (idiot) in the middle of the road forcing me out of the aerobars to avoid.

Into the second lap I knew I had it all to do if I wanted to break that record and it dawned on me with about 4 miles to go that I needed to make up 1 mph average speed to do it, not easy. I was still going quite well and with the last of the dodgy corners out of the way I was into the last 2 and a bit miles down Ripley Road, I still needed to push the average from 26 to 26.5 mph, that was incentive enough to bury myself for the last 4 minutes, dong well over 400w and around 33-34mph, I got the 200m to go sign and it was yet to tick over that last 0.1 mph, it was going to be stupidly close… I lunged for the line and stopped my garmin on 30.50 exactly but knowing I started it 1 second early – if I had done it, it was going to be close!

I trundled back to the car and made my way to the HQ, I noticed people were not quite as happy as I was when I told them how I thought I got on, odd I thought, either my garmin was borked or someone had utterly smashed me to bits…all was revealed when I saw the time board and my time had been recorded as 31.49, this was good news as I knew it was a simple mistake and my time was 1 minute out, i.e. I had done the record by a single second. I felt a bit bad for Pete Tadros who had done 31.24 was under the impression for a fair while that he had won (Connal had done 31.52 beaten to 3rd spot by Liam who had done 31.40), but eventually my time was corrected and indeed I had won by 35 seconds from Pete who had to settle for yet another second place in this event, still pretty impressive to still be smashing it into the majority of riders, and he made a mug of me in our club hill climb! Liam also bettered his previous time by some margin to take 3rd spot.

A good morning all in all, thanks to Paceline RT being fielding some very nippy riders in Pat Wright and Keith Lea, we managed to break the team course record too from A3crg, I came away with a decent wedge of cash which is a nice way to end a mornings pain, that 1 second earned me £100, watch out Cav, not even you earn £100 a second! Next week we do it all again at Redhill, a decent field signed up there, too,  with many of today’s riders and some more strong men in Wouter, Chris Mac and Jamie Pine (and many others I’ve probably not spotted!) signed up. It should be good!

https://www.strava.com/activities/252084087/overview

Big thanks to KW for a great event and Dominic Trevett for the awesome poster http://dominictrevett.blogspot.co.uk/ – sadly the sodding cat has knocked it over and broken the glass already! So I’ll have to find my local art shop to rectify that pronto.