ECCA Championships 10 mile TT, 20 Jul 2024

Who doesn’t want to cycle down a dual carriageway on a beautiful Saturday afternoon? The main reason for entering this race was to get a chance to practice cycling hard while impersonating a turtle – tucking my head into my shoulders. When I signed on and breezily told the other competitors I hadn’t done many time trials and wasn’t too familiar with the course I discovered that I do indeed look like a triathlete. Dear reader, it turns out I have shoulders. Another clue may have been my favourite world triathlon socks…

No photos from the TT so here’s one of Lizzie on her TT bike but in a triathlon

Despite the simplicity of the course I still worried about turning off too early or too late so I cycled a lap as a warmup and re-discovered that cars (and lorries!) drive fast on these roads. I was gunning for a power target for the race, plus a silly made-up round number time I wanted to hit because I didn’t entirely believe the race prediction for spindata. The outward leg was into a headwind and in a slightly muddled state I started mental maths of how much slower I’d be compared to my round-number time. Needless to say I can barely count to 4 when racing (swimming is interesting…) so this diversion didn’t exactly help and after a slightly ill-timed dash around the roundabout I started the return leg feeling much more tired than I expected to be but going a lot faster. Tailwinds are wonderful things!

Cycling hard into a headwind and then hanging on for dear life towards the line was exactly what I was supposed to do in the end – and in the end I was faster than the race prediction from spindata by 1 second. Maybe these time triallist statisticians do know a thing or two after all!

23:15 54th overall / 6th female

Lizzie Fox