As a cyclist preparing for an important race you try to control your preparations as much as you can. Your sleep, your bag for race, and what you have for breakfast is all carefully planned. But life doesn’t always go as planned, especially as women, and just as we were leaving the hotel to go to the racing I got a curve ball thrown at me. What can one do in those circumstances except role with the punches? So after some last minute scrambling, I was finally ready to get in the van and head off.
We got to the parking area, unloaded the two trikes and went to find our spot in the tents where we could do our final preparations ad our warm up. As we sat in our section of the tent it was also a time to greet friends from other countries. Carol Cooke, my friend, came to say hi and we started talking about the possibility of making the team for the 2020 Paralympics if they ring fence my class, but our para-cycling director said that even if they ring fence my class they wouldn’t select me. I also saw, my friend Hannah from England from a distance. While sitting and waiting for the time to pass I also saw the new competitor from Mexico and we could have an idea of where she sat in our class.
Eventually it was time for me to get on myself trike and start warming up. Roxy help me get all my kit on that wasn’t already on and get on my bike and then I started to do laps around the outside of the tent. O’ryan and Ahmed took Goldy to the start line as he was starting before me. Roxy and I then proceeded to go to the starting area where I briefly greeted friends of mine that lived in the Netherlands and had driven two hours to support me and the team. Ahmed kept it light in the starting area, teasing me and so on, and we had one or two chuckles. Soon it was time to get serious and start up the start ramp.
The fact that I had been competing throughout the year really helped me with some of the nervous and just to be in the right frame of mind. It is always disappointing that the other competitors catch me so fast but hopefully the faster I get the longer it will take them to catch me. The positive side of them catching me is that once they have passed me I know there is no one coming from behind and I can just focus on getting into a rhythm and race my own race. I managed to keep a good pace and there just one section of the route, where we raced on a section of the highway where things got a bit hairy because the men started lapping me and there wasn’t much space for one trike to pass another. Thankfully Ahmed would tell me when another trike would want to pass me. I knew that this time trial was the longest one that I had ever done but this was the World Championships so I knew I had to push and see what I could do. There were aspects of my racing like corners which I felt I was doing so well. When I looked down at my odometer I realized just how well I was doing. My average speed, around 20.5km/h, was the highest it had ever been during a race and I just hoped I could keep it so high. I knew my high average speed wouldn’t really affect the outcome of the race but often I have learnt that I must focus on my own race and improvement before I compare myself to otherwise athletes.
Sadly about two or three kilometres before the finish I start to find it really painful to sit on the saddle. I was moving around on my seat so much in an attempt to be able to be comfortable so that I could keeping peddling that my speed dropped quite a bit and by the time I crossed the line my average speed was 18.9km/h which was still a personal best. Although I was disappointed that I could not finish the race strongly I was so happy to get another personal best this year. At the finish line it was great to have an opportunity to catch up with my friends, Renee and Dirk, before they had to drive back home. We hang around for a while to see the medal ceremony (neither Goldy nor myself qualified for a medal but it was nice to see our friends receive theirs.)
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Ok, so I will be honest here. I started writing this blog at the beginning of December and my aim was to finish the blogs about World Championships before the year end as I really wanted to start writing about the new season which for me started in November. So I am not going to continue writing a whole blog about the road race, especially where it is one I would rather forget about, and the trip home. We are in a new season, and a new year so let’s move on. . . I will just say that I did do the road race and finished sixth.
Here are some photos of the road race
