Midlands Round 3 – Bringewood

We turned up to see cloudy skies and a wet track. I walked the course Saturday morning. It was surprisingly long and very slippery in places. Saturdays practise started off very wet and greasy. My first practise run with teammate Lee was unbelievably slippery. As soon as we got to the bottom it was straight to the van to put spikes on.

I got around 7 runs in and the track dried up nicely towards the end of the day. For my last run I put a dry tire on the front. It was awful! I fell off once and had an infinite number of sketchy moments.

Later on Saturday night it rained for well over an hour so I put my spike tire back on. I walked the course again with Lee and there was standing water everywhere. It was looking worse than it was before practise again.

Dad cooked us some food and I had to do some Maths Homework.

We woke up Sunday morning to an unexpected beautifully clear sky. The thought of how much the track was going to dry out was constantly on my mind. I had time for 2 runs down with spikes on. It was very slippery and there was quite a lot more spray at the beginning of the day. The sun was drying up the course quite nicely.

I kept the spikes on for my first race run though. To get used to racing Nationals I have been treating my first runs at normal races as my only run. So on my first run I took it safe but not conservative. I had a few sketchy moments that lost a little bit of time but all in all it was a good run. I was put into 2nd place with a 2 mins 42.2 seconds.

-Wall of funny faces; Alva Coppard doing a great job on the commentating by the way!

Before my last run I put my dry tires back on. It was going to be faster than before but I really tried hard in my first run and was feeling tired. The change of tires was a good choice and I could feel it rolling faster. I made a few big mistakes that lost me a quite a lot of time. Despite this I went a second faster; 2 mins 41.0 seconds. Course conditions had changed largely. I was pushed down to 4th position; disappointed.

-Lee obviously won the hard tail category by a large amount of 14 seconds with a 2 mins 46.9 seconds. Amazing stuff!

Nationals at Inners, Scotland this weekend! Hopefully I will be on it this round!

Thanks to DMR, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, Mojo, Mace, Nike 6, Twenty26, Geax and Motor Tabs.