My First Win – 52 Sports; Sport 4 – Grass Track Cycling
I’ve always been a fan of cycling, it’s the most incredible sport when you think about it. On the endurance side they’re cycling 180km in 4.5 hours, doing average speeds of 25mph or more on the flat. Lately I’ve been cycling more and when on an hour ride I do about 16 mph average, and on my 3.6 mile time trial route I can get to just over 18 mph. On the sprint side, the winner of the latest Under 23′s Euro’s did a 1km time trial in 1 minute and 2 seconds, which is over 36 mph.
The problem is that although I’ve always wanted to enter a bike race, it’s one of those sports where you can’t hide if you’re rubbish. If I was to enter a 10 mile time trial right now, I’d be about 15 minute behind the leader, which is quite a lot when you consider that they will have only taken 20ish minutes to do it.
But I got over my issues and I found a race that I was happy (in the nervous sense of the word) to enter.
It was a few miles away from my house, so I set off cycling and made my way to where it was being held; in a school field. When I arrived everyone was just unpacking and unsure as to what was going to happen because the rain had started but we hoped it would lay off.
There’s only one thing I can say about the whole event. It was incredible.
I have never seen grass roots sport done so well. Maybe that’s because I’ve been around motorsport for so long but all sports could learn a thing or two from British Cycling.
Having arrived and signed in, I was given a sheet with the outline for the evening, explaining each event that I would be doing (I had entered the omnium, which in this case was a combination of 3 events with the person gaining the most points winning overall) and so I knew where I stood. However due to it being the first round of the series and the weather, the numbers weren’t quite what they were hoping for, but the 3 seniors (that’s me, apparently) all met and decided that instead of us all having different bikes (I had a hybrid, one guy had a road bike, one guy had a track bike) that we should use the same bikes…
This brings me onto my favourite thing about the event. It’s under the ‘Go-Ride’ banner which is British Cycling’s way of getting young people interested in cycle sport and this event was directly supported by British Cycling which meant that they bought all the kit with them, including about 15 bikes. So, if you were that way inclined, you could turn up to a bike race, without a bike, and still race.
Fantastic.
So once we’d all got our bikes we lined up for our first race, this was going to the sprint, a 1 lap, 400m sprint around the schools running track. The race began, and something quite extraordinary happened.
I won. I still don’t know quite how it happened but I made sure that I got a good start, then kept pedalling hard around the first 200m, occasionally looking over my shoulder, but I’d pulled away and even though I was slowing up in the last 100m I crossed the line first. I was quite astounded really, but not bad for my first race.
So, sport number 4 done. 48 to go. I encourage you all to have a go at grass track, it’s so easy and a lot of fun and all you have to do is be able to cycle in a big circle!
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NB: I dramatically lost the other 2 races because they were more endurance based, but we won’t talk about them!
