Full Gas Winter Crit, Hillingdon, 11 Dec 2022

This was my first race for my new team and I was doing it in order to get some early points before the season gets under way to get my cat 2 quicker, however that plan has gone down the drain now. I had been ill for two weeks before the race and was probably at my worst just before that I believe with a chest infection so I’d had little training before the race and poor sleep during the week. We also only got there 30 mins before the race as there was bad traffic and I had to change my cassette too so I had no warm up either.

We weren’t doing the whole circuit as it was too frosty on the top part so we did a circle which was about a mile long maybe with no hills and no bends you couldn’t pedal round making it a very hard circuit to get away on. It was almost definitely just going to be a drag race to a sprint by the end so I decided to use it as training and kept trying to get away and jump on attacks. I was coughing quite a lot during the race and my nose kept becoming blocked as I couldn’t clear my nose when so tight to the other riders so I couldn’t breathe very well.

Then to top it all off with around 5 minutes left I had moved up as someone had countered as a few riders had been caught. I slotted in on a wheel and one other the guys who’d just got back tried to push me off my wheel, after him trying to nudge me off it a few times I was focusing quite a lot on not letting him get the wheel and not focusing on the wheel itself. I looked up and my wheel was overlapping the wheel in front very slightly, the guy in front had started braking suddenly and I had nowhere to go. The bike tried to fall over and I managed to unclip my right foot and was trying to drag it on the floor but it wasn’t enough and the bike went from under me so I just rolled a lot and ended up sliding on my back off the track. It all happened so fast I couldn’t really tell what had happened.

I didn’t really care about my body or the bike I was just so angry that I’d come off so I just stayed still on my back and waited for people to come over as I was around 100 yards from the line. I couldn’t really take in what people where saying and I wasn’t really registering what was going on again I was just full of adrenaline and anger but eventually I got up and wanted to finish the race but the wheel wasn’t inline with the bars so I couldn’t. Thankfully I hadn’t broken anything, I just had road rash on my elbow, knee and then the worst area being the top left side of my left thigh which was quite deep in areas also the left side of my hip has limited movement without pain, which is getting better now and similarly on my left ankle. At the end of the day there’s always a risk in road racing, it’s just a massive shame it happened at my first race of the season. I now won’t be able to race till the new year and it has knocked my confidence. But I will get back to training as soon as possible so I can make up for this.

Chris King