My First 25

Ever since I started doing Olympic distance triathlons, I have been interested to know just how fast I was capable of going on the bike if I did not have to do the swim and run in the same event as well. Thankfully, the standard distance for the triathlon is 40km and within the cycling community, a number of races are put on throughout the year which are exactly the same length (almost anyway, 25miles or 40.3km).

So, yesterday I headed out to the Redmon CC Open 25 which was going to give me a good chance to have a go at getting round the 25 as quick as possible. The whole time trialling world seems very serious, when we got there there were people warming up on their turbo machines all over the place, some people even seemed to have two bikes there, one to warm up on and then one to race. The whole place was like some festival of carbon fibre as well, to be honest, I was pretty thankful that I had a disc wheel as it at least meant that I fitted in to some extent. Putting on my triathlon club colours probably did not go down too well though...there is a long running rivalry between "real" cyclists and triathletes as the cycling community just sees us as all having pretty shoddy bike handling skills...to some extent they are right as we never really ride in groups etc.

There is a distinct difference though between these events and any triathlon as well...a club house serves as race HQ, there are no adverts anywhere and it is like stepping back into the 60's with the way that everything is organised, think tea urns and cake etc.

Anyway, after getting the tubs all pumped up I headed off to the start (two blokes on the side of the road) and did a few hard sprints etc to warm the legs up. For those that don't know, a time trial works as such, every 1 minute a rider is set and the riders are organised (from previous times) in a way that means that there won't be too much overtaking. Obviously, I was just chucked in randomly as they had no idea as to what sort of time that I would be able to do as this was my first event.

Around came 9:12 and I was off, sprinting hard to get the speed up as quickly as possible and found that I quickly managed to get into a nice steady rhythm, even if it did feel that that the heart was racing way too much. I had been here before though, so just carried on and eventually it calmed down a bit. The whole idea of having people further up the road is massive attraction for someone like me. It was not long before I could see the chap who started a minute ahead of me and I was past him in about 8 minutes...at this point, I did worry a bit - had I gone off too fast. That was the one piece of advice I had remembered for the race. Anyway, it ws not long before I passed the 2 min man and then a lady who was 4 mins ahead of me. My biggest concern though was that I knew that the chap who started 2 mins behind me had been in the UK top 10 for this sort of race...therefore I had to hold him off as long as possible. Eventually he came past me at about half way which I worked out meant that I was having a pretty good race, I was aiming to do a 57 minute ride so it seemed about right to get passed there. He was the kick up the ass that I needed though, I hadn't been pushing as hard as I should have been for a few minutes so when he came past I tried to hold him at a set distance ahead of me for as long as possible. Obviously, he soon moved further and further away though...I think it must have been his 6k bike that was helping him and not his legs :-)

Time rolled on though and I had already decided that when it got to about 48 minutes, I was going to start hurting myself as much as possible to get to the finish line. I was feeling pretty good so when I started to push harder, the legs were responding quite well. The problem was I did not realise was that the slip road with 4 blokes sat there was actually the finish. Stupid me went straight past it and only then realised that must be the finish. Cue some pretty dangerous turning on the middle of a dual carrigeway to get back to the slip road. I crossed the line and looked at the watch and it said 55:56....I couldn't quite work it out...I didn't think that I would be able to go that fast, that is averaging about 43kph for the event. In the end, this messing around cost me about 30s I reckon.

Got back to the race HQ and had a look at the times and realised that my 55 was pretty high amongst, what I had been told, a very high quality field. I had seen on the start sheet that they have a novice prize which can be won by anyone that has not raced before. I spoke to the organiser and said that I would like to be considered for the prize. He did seem a bit shocked by my time actually but I did not think too much of it.

Prize giving eventually started and at the end of the day, I did actually manage to win the novice prize for the day. The best thing about this is that I managed to pick up a pretty big trophy that dates back to 1939. I also have the fastest ever time on the trophy as well, by about 3 minutes as well, the second fastest I can see is a 59:22.



So, all in all a good 7 days...2 races and 2 trophies.

Results are here