British Women's Team Cup, 19 Sep 2021

After a brilliant race at the Hitchin Nomads road race, I hoped that I could have another great ride at the last round of the British Women’s Team Cup race. I was guest riding for Brother-UK Cycle Team OnForm, so I wanted to ride well for the team. Our race was an hour and a half around Hillingdon, so I knew that this race was going to be fast race, and that I was at a disadvantage because I was the only rider that had restricted gears. Hillingdon is a very flat and fast circuit, so I was most likely going to be spinning out and feeling under-geared.

I had a good warm up, doing 20 minutes on the rollers and I did a couple of practice laps too. On the start line, it started to rain (typical!) so I knew that this was going to be grim. Going round Hillingdon for an hour and a half in the pouring rain on a Sunday morning, what more could you want?! I didn’t get a good start, my foot kept slipping off the pedal as I tried to clip in, about 4 tries until my foot finally clipped in! Thankfully we had a neutralised first lap so I made a few spaces up during this. The rain started to pour down at this point.

When our race officially started, the pace was really quick so I knew I had to stick in for as long as I could and hope the pace would slow down. I managed to hang on to the bunch for the first 10 minutes, but as expected I started to feel under-geared and was spinning out on the hardest gear I could get into. It was one of those moments where, no matter how fast your legs was spinning, the bike wasn’t really going anywhere. I aimed to ride solo and see if I could join a group to work in. After a couple of laps a teammate from Team OnForm told me to join her group. She controlled the group’s pace in order for me to recover. We rode well together and managed to find another rider to join our group. We did this for most of the race dropping and catching other riders. An hour into the race we caught up with my other teammate who had managed to stick in the main group for almost an hour. She joined our group, so we had 3 riders from Team OnForm and 2 riders from TW1 RT. With 3 laps to go, we got lapped so we decided to just sit on the back of the bunch (we weren’t allowed to ride at the front of the bunch). We sat on the back for the rest of the race but with 1 lap to go I just couldn’t hold on any longer. At the end I rolled in 32nd.

That was the last road race of the season for me until next year. I would have liked to have a better performance to end my best season yet. However, I loved the experience doing team racing and I learnt a lot!

Amy Harvey