Caersws Cup Round 1;

Saturdays practise started a bit slow for me. The course was greasy and I think I ride at my worst in these conditions. It didn’t feel like I was riding at the speed I knew I could. However, by midday it started to get a bit tackier and I got to know the course with more speed. There were a lot of riders scattered over the course in difficult sections so it was hard to practise hard sections. On one practise run I went across the rock garden and into a tricky off camber rooty section and over took a guy on the right. Just in front of him was another rider that was getting up from a crash and he picked his bike up, began to twist it round and his bike moved into my line. I was cutting the edge off a corner by jumping through some trees over some roots, back onto the main line. I hit my left side of the bar in the air on his wheel and my right side of the bar skimmed a tree. It’s a fast and hard section of the course so I was absolutely buzzing as I managed to get out the other side of it! The rest of practise I was happy with and managed to get a couple good full runs in.

Early Sunday morning it absolutely threw it down with rain. It was on and off all day too. I did a couple of practise runs in the morning without rain but got very muddy.

My first race run was in a hail storm. I put a lot into this run trying to treat the race like a national; only having one run. The course was developing quite a bit and took me by surprise in a few sections. In between the steep fast and technical sections were some pedally bits that really took their toll on my lungs. I got down and got a 2mins 49seconds. This put me into 1st place and gave me a 3 second lead.

The rain kept on coming and there was a break for the elite riders. I had thoughts of the track rolling faster with the rain washing some of the mud away so I knew I would have to post a better time in my second run. My second run was hard. I was very tired from the first run still and got very out of breath into the middle section. I knew it was rolling faster when I got closer to the bottom. It was a lot faster and this made me nervous as my top section was not as well as it should have been. It pinned the last bit landing flat into the field section and getting sideways. I pedalled to the line as fast as I could and beat my time by 4 seconds retaining my win by 4 seconds.

Here are a few pics;

Thanks to, DMR, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, Last, Mojo, Nike 6, Twenty26, Funn, Maxxis, and KMC