Shrewsbury National Trophy

Last weekend I raced the last round of the cyclocross national series, which well didn't go quite to plan.

After travelling up Saturday afternoon the course was completely different to previous years with a lot more off-camber sections, as well as more of the course centered around the start and finish area. Shrewsbury is usually a mud fest with a vast majority of the course having to be run with your bike on your shoulder, but this year there wasn’t too much mud to talk about, instead there were quite a number of sections that became very slippery as well as draggy in some places where the ground was so soft. Overall though the course was running pretty well and so was looking forward to the race the next morning.

After the short trip back to the hotel for the night and making sure everything was ready for the next day it was into bed. After a pretty bad night's sleep it was race day, a porridge pot and some granola eaten and it was back to the race venue. Once signed on and numbers pinned on, as well as tightening my cleats back up again after coming loss after course practice yesterday it was back onto the course for another to lap just to see if anything had changed. Everything had dried out slightly overnight but the course was running pretty much exactly the same as it was the previous afternoon and so nothing had to be changed which was pretty easy.

After hopping onto the rollers and completing my warm up to try and wake the legs up it was down to the start in time for gridding. I was gridded on the 2nd row which put me in a pretty good position going into the first corner which was a off camber hairpin which then sent us down the tarmac straight parallel to the start straight and onto the course. I managed to get a fairly good start but just couldn’t follow that through the rest of the race, struggling to get into a rhythm and feeling pretty out of breath it was just about getting round rolling in 18th which I was pretty gutted with after feeling pretty good during course practice the day before. But I now have two days off to help recover and look ahead to next weekend for the National Champs which I am looking forward to.