London Dynamo Road Race, 11 May 2025

Markovitch James

Sunday was my first ever Road Race, a women’s 2/3/4 in Oxfordshire. It was a hot and sunny day, and I had no idea what to expect. We rolled out at about 1pm, right in the heat of the day, and I was doing my best to maintain a decent position in case anything started happening. I chased down a few attacks, but the race got neutralised as we apparently weren’t sticking to our side of the road enough.

After this, I ended up a lot further back in the group, and struggled to make up many places. At this point, I was so dehydrated - I’d very foolishly only bought 1 bottle for what turned out (with the rides to and from HQ) to be 100km in the sun. An attack went off the front, but I was too far back to make it in. Very luckily, three other strong girls were in the same situation, and for an absolutely dreadful 15km or so we chased back on, working very well together. We made it back to the front group with only about 5km to go, which felt great. I hadn’t got much of a sprint left after all that chasing, but came in 14th out of about 50 starters, which I was really pleased with. The dehydrated 13km ride back to HQ was the longest of my life. Lessons learnt!

Freya Taylor