Friday 29 August 2014

Battling the Braes and the hurricane!

Haven't blogged for a while so thought I'd use this rainy rest day to update on the past few weeks.  A few days after returning home from the Tour de Bretagne, I was back racing in one of our local evening road races.  My legs had other ideas!!  Needless to say I didn't last long before being spat out the back and instead used it as a recovery spin.  I hate not finishing races, but I don't think I'd appreciated just how much the drive home from France had taken out of me.  So onto the next one...

The last race in the British Women's National Series was the Stafford GP, a crit in Stafford town centre on Friday night and a kermesse on the Saturday afternoon.  About an hour before the crit started there was a torrential downpour and there were literally rivers running down the street.  I'm not much of a crit fan at the best of times so the prospect of racing on wet roads on a tight circuit did not leave me massively excited about the race...Thankfully it had dried up a bit before the race started but it was still a bit of a crash fest!  Saturday's kermesse was in the grounds of a country park and a pretty decent lumpy circuit.  Great solo attack by Jane Barr to stay away and take the win!  Then it was back into the car for the long drive home...

A very wet Stafford GP crit!

A few days later I was off on my travels again, flying to London for the RideLondon Women's GP.  This is a very cool race around St James' Park, passing right in front of Buckingham Palace!  It had a super impressive line up as well with none other than Marianne Vos, Lizzie Armitstead, Laura Trott, Georgia Bronzini to name a few.  I won't say too much about this race, apart from that it was a total mechanical disaster and one of the worst races I have ever done for that reason.  Some days you have good races, some days you have not so good races and that race was most definitely the latter!!


Training up Box Hill with my team mate Jasmine before RideLondon GP.

Since then I've raced a few more times with a double header a few weekends ago with Battle of the Braes road race one day and the Auld Yins and Ladies road race the next.  Flanders Moss was reminiscent of Dutch racing and the race-shattering cross winds!!  Brutal I think is the word best used to describe this race, but in a weird way it was a lot of fun.  Although I do think the mini Braes are far worse than the big Braes! 

So now there's a few local(ish) races (in Scotland) before heading over to Ireland for the women's 5 day, 6 stage race Ras na mBan.  This will be the third year I've raced the Ras and its just such an awesome race!  I've gone from breaking my chain and having to ride a bike about 2 sizes too big for me in men's trainers about 5 sizes too big for me in the first year, to second place in the stage 3 TTT and enjoying life in the breakaway from the gun on stage 5 last year.  Pretty excited for what promises to be an even tougher race this year! 

So that about sums up the past month or so.  Its been a long season and with only a few more races left the Ras will be a nice end of season finale before some time out to recharge my body and mind!

Cheerio for now,

Jools.