Post Mortem

When your friend asks you, 5 kilometres into a race, if its still neutralised, you know you aren't going as fast as you should. When the flag dropped last Sunday and the lead car sped away, nothing changed. I actually thought I was in a sportif and the feed was coming up soon. Alas it took three quarters of a lap for the touch paper to be lit. Having said that, I wasn't going to be the one that lit it, was I? In the previous 10 days I'd slept little, travelled a lot, ate badly and not trained at all like I should have. So, just like the first race of the season, I was into the unknown and going to play it conservatively in case I didn't make it to the end. And Dungarvan is a tough race where anything can happen and when it does go, it fires off hard. Three kilometres of a tough climb to finish is only the half of it, theres also the sinuous back road that seems endless, and the long straight road before that, like a no-man's land where everyone feared to thread. Throw in Sunday's rain and wind and the consequent Belgian toothpaste and you have a tough day and a tougher day for a white Barrow Wheeler jersey! I'm gonna park the first of two laps because really we rode like...well..as if we were parked! Then it rained a little... the pace went up, we climbed like diminutive Spanish mountain goats and the pace stayed elevated and excited for the whole second lap. I hid in the top twenty, told myself to take it handy and stayed out of the wind. And despite a couple of crazed lunatic bike handlers, determined to frighten/ put on edge/ agitate and aggravate a whole bunch of cyclists, we arrived intact at the base of the final climb and someone switched on the fan, because the s##t hit it! Three kilometres in zero time. I sat comfortable in the top 10 all the way to the 300m mark. My lungs burned badly and I could not have cycled harder. And I never realised 300m could be so long. We were swamped at the finish and completely empty. After I stopped hyper-ventilating I began the post-mortem. Apt, considering my legs were dead. What could I have changed? I had stayed in the top thirty, out of the wind and out of trouble. Yet some of those that beat me had hidden even further back for the whole race. I don't know if I'm prepared to do that because its skittish at the back, my nerves would be shot. And the elastic stretches even further back there. If I want to feel like a bungee-jumper I'll head to New Zealand for a gap year. My handling was a lot better in the rain too, yet I didn't capitalise on it by attacking. Notoriously, A4 races tend to stay together. But thats only because people are happy to stay there and wait. But in my last two races, 50 of those that stayed hiding at the back were still at the back when the race was over. Now that IS headless! I'd rather race at the next level up for one hour and be dropped than coast and wear brake-blocks for two. But I'll have to change my tune...; I have to sleep, eat, train and focus with intent if I want to win my targets in May.