Hemel Hempstead CC 10 mile TT F11/10, 15 June 2019

After a week away it was time to get back into TT mode for this event which I had been looking forward to as it was my first attempt on this fast course in a very competitive field where only people with PBs better than 20.30 were able to get in. The recent changeable weather delivered a cool and blustery day with intermittent rain which dampened my warmup and ride to the course but held off during the ride itself. The F11/10 course is an unusual one - you start, go down the dual carriageway to the first turn, retrace past the start, down a ‘gift’ hill to a second turn and back to the finish. The two turns and the downhill section made it hard to keep consistent power, and my plan to save some power for the part towards the second turn into the wind just meant I did a lower average power than targeted, which was disappointing. I was caught by my minute man not long before the finish, and gave it everything I had in the last two miles. I thought I was on for a much faster time than I actually got - just snuck inside my previous PB with a time of 19.56, at least proving that my previous sub-20 time last season wasn’t a fluke!

Tim Phillips

Photo: Trevor Hill