This week was no ordinary week…
It also involved A LOT of hours on the road and the mountain bike! However, I was joined by some quite astonishingly good weather for January in Scotland!
Sunday was the biggest race of my season, the race i’d put hours and hours of training into, the race i’d sacrificed a lot for, the race that really counted!
So I needed to be completely focussed and ready to give it everything i’d got.
The start line is always a scary place, i’d put so much time into the preperation for this race, and I had 40 minutes to make it show.
The gun went, my foot was straight in the pedal and I put the power down.The course sort of suited me. It was dry but the corners were techinical and there was a lot of time to be gained on them. 2 laps in and I was still feeling good. Beth Crumpton was on my wheel and I was trying to make her suffer, cornering as fast as I could and powering it down the straights. Eventually I got a gap and I knew I had to go for it. I could feel the burn but I remembered the feeling of taking the title last season and I wanted so bady to defend it.
Me and Beth locked together.
The finishing straight was in sight and I knew i’d done it! It was a feeling of relief, knowing my hard work had paid off and knowing that i’d made my family, friends and team proud!
Well done to Beth who took 2nd and Becky Preece 3rd.
So all thats left to do is to take the series title. Im in the leaders jersey going into it and im up for another fight to keep it.
Thanks to everyone for all their support this season. I couldn’t have done it without them.
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I have been a bit lax on the blogging front over the past few weeks. I’ve been busy sorting things out with my new team Rapha Condor Sharp, and also getting some important base training done. I’ve been mainly tackling the cold and usually wet Sussex road by myself. I had a spell of 2-3 weeks where I was doing 4-5 hour spins on a regular basis. I backed off just before Christmas when I was starting to feel tired. I then had an easy week between Christmas and New Year to properly recharge the batteries before tackling the second and final part of the Winter.
Since going up to the Claremont hospital in Sheffield with the team I have found out that I am deficient in both Iron and Vitamin D. So I am now on the correct supplements to set this right – this highlights how important having a partner like Claremont is to the team. Even more so when one of my team mates broke his collar bone and he was able to be checked and have surgery within a week of the accident.
Christmas and New Year for me was very relaxed. I stayed at home and enjoyed some good food, some bad telly and some very steady road rides. I’ve also had Camille and Tom Southam – our team photographer and press officer– come down to the house for interviews and photographs. On a second visit I was chasing Camille on his motorbike (hooked up with cameras) around Beachy Head in horrific conditions. Again, the team have been so efficient getting all of this done already! Plus, the press/journalism side is something that also interests me quite a lot.
As I’m writing this I’m sat on a plane with my team mate Oliver Rossi flying over to Lanzarote for our first team training camp. The rest of the team would have already landed and probably won’t be far from the hotel at this point. I’ve been looking forward to this camp for a while and can’t wait to get out on the road with my new team mates. The Spanish sun and 22+ degrees temperature will also be a nice bonus. I’m not sure yet what the plan is training wise but I’ve heard mention of; race radios, lead out practice and coffee – so I’m a happy boy!
My first race with the team will be the Tour of Taiwan mid-March. The team’s position in the race was looking doubtful but we had a nice surprise a few weeks ago when we received an entry. After doing some research on the race and looking at picture from the past few years it looks like a pretty big event! It’ll be the biggest race I’ll have competed in anyway. There was a prologue TT last year – 2km = 1 lap of the crit course – but it appears to have been removed for this year’s edition, which is a bit of a disappointment, but then again I won’t be short of things to be thinking about with seven stages! There’s a good mix of hard hilly courses, a couple of sprint stages and a 60km crit on the final day. The team has had success in the past few years it has done it, so let’s hope we can replicate it this year.
In other English related news; I got to meet Edith Bowman from Radio 1 whilst we were both working at an event at the Olympic Velodrome! I even got my name mentioned on her next show – this had me very happy for a 24 hours! I also got to meet the ‘voice over guy’ from the X Factor, Pete Dickson. Family wise, my Sister finished her cross season on Saturday with take a top 10 in the national cross championships. She’s been training hard over the past months with the British Cycling Talent Team – there may be some conflicts this year in the household with myself riding for Ireland and my little Sister riding for GB. My Dad is in training for the Wicklow 200 this year. It’s a 200km sportif over some pretty savage terrain. All I know is my Dad was out on the bike this morning at 8am for a planned 100 mile spin!! At least there’s 1 athlete in the house…
I’ll leave it at that for now as my battery is starting to die, and I quite fancy shutting my eyes for 20 minutes before we land. I will do my best to do a couple of updates whilst I’m out in Lanzarote.
Thanks for reading, hope you had a good New Year,
Felix
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Morvélo Test Team riders Ray and Harry welcome in the New Year. Here's to more bikes, more fun and more riding in 2012.
This week I have had a couple of new pieces go online. Check them out by clicking the links
Rab’s World – I don’t right columns everyone will like, I leave that to The Bee Gees…
http://singletrackworld.com/2011/12/rabs-world-gradually-getting-better/
10 under the Pen – 10 quick fire questions from XCracer.com
http://www.xcracer.com/Rab-Wardell-Interview-10-Under-The-Pen.html
At the moment I am settling into a training block to take me through Christmas and the New Year with some double shifts on the trainer, running and some home gym work. It’s gonna be mentally testing and a little monotonous but has to be done. I’m back in hospital on the 17th of January and hope to be back in the bike soon after. However, I know it might not be quite that straight forward…
’til next time keep the top of the chain tight and go easy on the figgy pudding
Rabulous
Went for a little ride last saturday, met up with some guys and had a sweet sesh at the MOD step up and Mandry's. It was a good sesh. Learnt Flip whips and tried Double whips. Got close going to get them both dialled this weekend down Famous.
Check this out....
The 5th round of the National Trophy seies was in Bradford. I’d kept an eye on the weather forecast all week and knew it was going to be a really muddy race. The course was rideable in the warm up laps before the racing started but after the 1st event it started to rain and the course got really slippy. By my race there was a fair bit of running up the climbs which weren’t rideable anymore and prooved pretty hard to run! One of the descents I found quicker to run; the majority that tried to ride it ended up crashing.
I finished in 5th, not one of my best results. I had a good ride with no reasons to not be going well, but there was some very tough competition who were better than me on the day. But it got me into the yellow jersey for the final round in Shrewsbury so i’m very happy :)
Well done to Annie Last who had a very good win!
I want to write about something slightly different to the kind of things I usually write about. So my topic today is – Advantages and disadvantages of being small in cycling. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly small at 175cm but compared to the majority of the guys I race against I am definitely on the smaller end of the scale. Being a smaller rider is often used as an excuse for being weaker than some of our larger counterparts. However, I don’t really agree. There are a few main points you will hear people come up with, why being small is an inconvenience in cycling. Firstly, and one which I can definitely relate to a certain extent is, trying to find a bike that fits you properly! This can definitely be a bit of inconvenience when you don’t fit between the standard 54-58cm frame size bracket. In my case, it’s not my height that causes a problem as I fit quite nicely on a 51-52cm bike, but it’s my body geometry. Inevitably passed down from both my parents, I have short legs and a long torso. This usually means a super small bike so I can get enough saddle height and then a nice long 14cm steam to allow for my overly long reach. However, once you have managed to hunt down a frame that’s small enough for you – I have seen a lot of people who have clearly given up on the search and ride bikes way too big for them – there are some definitely advantages to a small frame – it’s lighter and more compact which usually makes for a more responsive and stiffer machine. Secondly, a lot of people believe it can be hard to compete against the larger rider in TT’s and those horrible flat windy races. It’s true that to do well in these disciplines you need to be able to produce a lot of power and having the larger levers does usually help in this field. However, the fact you’re bigger means than you’re having to push more of that wind. This was one of my excuses when I taking a beating in past races, but it more came down to the fact that I wasn’t strong enough, or fit enough to compete with the other guys who had simply trained harder than me! So now I am training correctly, I think I should be a lot closer to these guys. Another aspect I’ve been looking into, to make those all important ‘marginal gains’ is aerodynamics whilst road racing. I’m experimenting with a few ideas, but the main and seemingly most obvious one to do was to cover the vents in my road helmet. The idea was stolen from my team mate Martyn Irvine, but after doing some research and seeing numbers and phrases such as ‘12% more efficient ‘ it seemed stupid that I’d never done it before. Especially after knowing an aero helmet over a regular road helmet in a TT is one of the biggest equipment gains you can make. After looking through my last 2 paragraphs of mindless ramblings, it appears I haven’t really made any proper points yet. So I’ll sum this post with a list of bullet points I have rattling round in my head about the advantages and disadvantages of being small- Disadvantages
Advantages
So to sum everything up, height doesn’t really make too much difference as long as you work on the aspects which will help you in those inevitable windy/TT/flat races. Basically, train hard and stay low and you’ll be fine. I hope. Gracias, Felix p.s not to be taken too seriously |
Yes, these legs of mine managed to do this…