The first of this year’s Classic Series of sporting (hilly) course TTs was being held down near the New Forest, and so we took the opportunity to stay over the weekend with Katie’s dad. The course was a 24 mile rolling loop from Wimborne Minster in East Dorset, which turned out to be a beautiful ride. A brief sunny ride in the Forest the day before would have been lovely but for gear issues which needed 4 stops to fix, not ideal! Luckily I managed to fix/bodge it when I got back.

The next morning started a little eventfully, with an ice cold shower (bad planning with the heating timer) to get me going. The drive round the course was lovely but left me a little short of time when I got to HQ, and then the lady who helped me with pins managed to stick one in my arm! After all this it was nice to get out on the course on my bike (which worked faultlessly on the day) and get some warmup in before the start.

On setting off at my ride time, my first thought after a couple of minutes in was that my power meter must be under-reading – it felt much harder than it should! But I think I just took some time to warm up properly, because soon I was into a decent rhythm up a steady drag towards the first left turn on the course after 6-7 miles. Just after this was the section that I identified as needing care – a sharp left/right over a narrow bridge followed by an effectively single track section that was a potential hold up with any traffic. Needless to say there was indeed traffic and I had to back right off almost to a standstill, getting caught by the rider behind me at this point (he would have caught me soon after anyway). Other than that, the ride was without incident, ranging from moderately steep uphills requiring extra power, and several sections where I was spinning fast in my highest gear and even running out of gears in one section.

I have power targets in mind for hilly TTs and usually find that I’m not able to hold these towards the end of a longer TT, but today was good – the legs did what they needed to and I was enjoying the thrill of the speed, and catching quite a few riders is always a nice boost. The final section was into a brisk headwind and needed every last bit of power while trying to stay as aero as possible, counting down the miles to the finish. Near the end I was focussing on trying to catch a couple of riders ahead and didn’t notice the finish until I’d gone past it!

My finish time was 55mins 37, beating my rough 1 hour target time, my Spindata prediction by a big margin and giving me 7th vet which I was satisfied with.

Tim Phillips

Classic Series TT Rd 1, 27 Mar 2022

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