Ok, well it wasn't quite "Tour de France" but I finally took a crack at a cycling time trial! and, well it was actually pretty fun!
The time trial was 13 miles, two laps of a 6.5 circuit in Hanningfield, Essex and lucky old me got to go off 2nd in a staggered "1 minute interval between each racer" start! basically for those who don't know, each cyclist goes off with a minute between each other... if you catch the one in front, you're basically a minute quicker than them and vica versa if the one behind catches you!
So there I went, I didn't have a clue what pace to start off at so I tried to keep my speed between 18-21 mph on the straights and 12-15 mph on the hills. This worked quite well, as I caught the number 1 cyclist after about 3 miles (although to be fair he seemed to be a beginner like me!) needless to say I was then the one to catch! which actually is quite daunting in a way because you have no one to chase and can only be caught!
I finished the first lap without being caught which I was quite happy with, in a time of roughly 18 minutes, after about half a mile into lap two however, racer no 3 started to hunt me down! He did catch me after 2 miles into the second lap and I then made it my mission to stick on his back wheel for as long as I could!
Whilst chasing I did feel my calf strain a little, which was probably the effects of Sundays skating in London and yesterdays training session indoors, but luckily I was able to keep low and stay right behind racer 3, which gave me a fair bit of rest for my aching legs on the downhill parts!
So here we are, myself and racer 3 reeling in the miles on our own, until roughly 2 miles to go, when racer 7 (yeah racer 7, meaning he caught everyone in front of him!) sped past in his expensive time trial bike and time trial helmet. I did think about chasing, but decided I wanted to save myself to make sure I definitely beat racer 3, who I was still clinging on to! and that's what I did, with about 400m to go, I smashed out whatever was left in my legs and managed to finish about 15 seconds in front of racer 3.
Overall it was really fun, with a rough unofficial time of 37 minutes (pretty good considering I do 12 miles to work in 38) and will definitely be doing more time trials in the future!
Jon
