May 2024

Tour of the Northwest, National U23 Road Series

Another long journey up north, this time to Cumbria, I went to recce both the courses on the Friday, the hilly course was good but the flat stage wasn’t rideable then, they’d had lots of really heavy rain in the week which had caused flooding on the course, at this point it looked unlikely a race could happen on it, the surface was bad with a fair few pot holes, which would make avoiding standing water hard very hard.

Thankfully Saturday was dry and warm and Sundays circuit had drained and was drying out well so was keeping everything crossed.

Saturday, Stage 1 - 117km Hilly 

The race had several early attacks with a couple riders getting 3 minutes, also there was several riders dropping off the group each time up the climb. With a lap and half to go we managed to close the gap down and finished just 14 seconds down on the front 3 riders.

Sunday, Stage 2 - 80km on a fairly flat & fast course. 

The forecast was not looking good, but somehow the rain stayed away.

Again this race was full of attacks, mostly from riders that were already a few minutes down, so there wasn’t too much panic. I tried to stay active also and had a few attempts to keep it hard. It was quite a short stage and ended with 8 riders away, I finished 3rd from the bunch kick.

The GC had changed and a new leader now had 45 seconds from me, I was now 8th on GC. This still left me quite confident going into the TT and felt a podium position was definitely within my capabilities providing I didn’t make any mistakes.

Stage 3 16km TT, it was on the same circuit as stage 2, so we all knew the circuit well form the morning stage, but we weren’t as lucky with the weather this time, about 30 minutes before the start it started drizzling and by the time I went off it was quite heavy, this made it a bit more unpredictable, when you don’t know what’s up ahead or if your going to be faced with standing water near a corner it means you have to be quite cautious at points, thankfully the two long straights were perfect for putting down the power.  
I finished feeling really good and pleased with my ride.

There was live timing but no signal so trying to get the results was a bit tricky, after being pointed into the right direction to get a bit of intermittent signal the results showed I was currently 14 seconds in the lead with only a few others left to finish.
It wasn’t long before I found out I had won the stage and gained enough time to take the GC also.

Now to get ready for National Championships.
The TT course for champs is technical & fairly hilly.
Really looking forward to it.