ECCA Championships F2A/25, 7 May 2022

The lead up to this event was far from ideal. The puncture and DNF at the last event had knocked the wind out of my sails, and work stress had contributed to a week of feeling fairly rubbish leading up to race day, meaning that the night before I was seriously considering not going. The lure of a fast course, and a weather forecast that suggested a wind direction that wouldn’t be as bad as last time on that course (which is very exposed to the westerly wind that is often there!), meant that on the morning I decided I would race.

Kimroy Photography. Depending on whether this was lap 1 or lap 2 I was either a) feeling smooth, strong and on target power or b) about to die - it’s hard to tell from the picture

I arrived at the course in plenty of time, with unusually an early start time meaning no-one had started racing yet. After a steady warmup on the road as it was a nice warm day, I was ready to start. The course is an out-and-back twice, so four main legs and three turns at roundabouts, plus a short dog leg at the beginning – slightly complicated but the main feature of the course is that the main legs are on smooth tarmac dual carriageway, with only slight (4% max) ups and downs along the way - a fast course in principle.

Heading out on the course my plan was to try and pace the four legs evenly on the basis that each one should be similar in terms of difficulty (mostly crosswind expected). For the first two legs this went mostly as planned – it was definitely a bit harder on the way back from the turn with the wind being cross-head on a couple of exposed sections. But by the turn I could feel that this wasn’t going to last – I was struggling to maintain the power I needed, and in fact had dropped a few watts from my target on the second leg (having stuck to it exactly for the first leg). Back out onto the dual carriageway for the third leg and it was all I could do to keep going. The time hadn’t seemed that fast at halfway and my motivation was slipping away along with my power. Now it definitely wasn’t fun, and I was just thinking about stopping! After the last turn I managed to find a little bit more, and told myself to use everything I had for the hard sections, one of which was near the finish. I also managed to catch my minute man just at the finish which was a nice extra carrot at the end.

I realised on the last leg that I had misjudged the time which was actually quite quick and after finishing with what I thought was just sub-23 (official time was 23:01), the frustration was that if I could have held the power I did only a few weeks ago on the Ely 25, that 22:30 or so would have been in reach which is close to my PB (and my PB is now 5 years ago!). Really, really frustrating and disappointing after such great results only a few weeks ago!

Further perspective on all this is that I came 35th in a stacked field - not so great but my Spindata predicted position (if you know, you know!) was 58th (and I beat the predicted time too) so that’s something at least.

Tim Phillips