Gorrick 2

Sunday was the 2nd round of the Gorrick Spring series and for me, the first race in Sport for this season. I had been looking forward to this race all week, mostly because I felt reasonably quick for this time of year but also because I would be meeting a couple of team mates and was looking forward to the extra competition! The course was pretty much as expected, fairly flat, loads of tight twisty singletrack and the odd bombhole. Not my ideal course if im honest, but at that pace, it was quite fun.


After a bit of pasta and a quick drink it was time to queue for the start, 15mins early as is the tradition with these races. I didn’t bother with a warm up because I would have lost any heat gained by the time the horn went anyway. Frustratingly, despite waiting for that long I was still pretty much at the back of the crowd. Once the horn went it was straight into a short downhill fire road, where I made up a quite a few places, followed by a short climb. In practice I hardly even noticed the climb but this time around my legs had had enough by half way up and I started going backwards in the field until I must have been nearly last! I watched Adam and Steve fly past and couldn’t muster the energy to keep up with them. After a couple of minutes of letting my legs recover I started to push on a bit and on the second section of fire road I managed to real in the boys in orange and get into the singletrack ahead of them.


From then on I never felt like I was going particularly well, I felt knackered because of the stop-start nature of the course, never feeling like I was riding smoothly. The first 2 laps passed pretty uneventfully after that, both dispatched in identical times. On my third lap I started losing concentration and had a couple of stupid crashes resulting in the loss of 3 places. In one of these, I caught my pedal on a log in the woods, my hand slipped over the bar and my ribs smacked into my stem. It took a couple of seconds leaning over my bar, panting, to get over the winded feeling and the stabbing pain in by ribs. I managed to claw back one of the places I had lost on the last lap and finished 14th, about 6 minutes back from the winner. I am definitely happy with the result, as I never felt I really got into the race and at this point last season I was much further back.


I can definitely take positives from the race but the most important thing I have learnt it the importance to work on my starts. I know I lost too many places at the start and took too long to recover from it to realistically challenge for higher positions.

For photos from this race check out Joolze Dymonds web site and for other perspective from this race have a look at Adam and Stevens blogs or the race report on the team website.