Autumn

The autumn has arrived so it was back out with the fleeces and gloves this morning.

Yesterday was a public holiday in Denmark so we had the day off to celebrate. I had an early start to take part in a bike race near Copenhagen. This time it was on the road and it was my first real road race of the year, in fact my first real road race for 4 years. I hadn't realised that it was also the Sjaelland Championships so there were nearly 60 in my category.

As we started the 87km it was overcast and cool. That soon changed into pouring rain and getting cold. Riding at 50km/h in torrential rain on someones wheel is like getting sprayed in the face with a hose pipe pumping cold, dirty, gritty water into your eyes, nose and mouth. It wasn't nice. The pace was furious as I tried to stay in the first 10 to 20 people to keep out of trouble but as time went by, it got harder and harder to follow the accelerations out of every corner. Our average speed for the first 45km was 39.8km/h and I'm not quite up to that at the moment. As I was trying to stuff an energy bar into my mouth, there was a sudden acceleration and I found myself out the back f the group. I decided to let it go and really gave up too easily. 300m later I decided to try and get back to the group when I realised that they were not far in the distance, but there was a strong headwind at that point and I didn't make much progress. A few km later 3 other guys caught up with me and we worked more or less together to get to the finish.

At the end I was 45th out of 50 which is fairly rubbish especially as we were about 6 minutes down on the main bunch. Hopefully my next road race will go a bit better, but there is a lot to learn about this road racing game and I still rather naive about it all.