As the off season approaches and the evenings draw in to what seems like an approaching winter, it is ultimately time for reflection. For some riders the season has been a fruitful few months to be celebrated with a few beers, for others the season has been one to forget. It is easy to do the latter, to think of Belgium as an experience not to be dabbled in again, but a loss doesn’t become a defeat until you refuse to learn from it. I had a fantastic time, met some great people and now have quite a few stories to tell the grandkids in years to come. But if I look at it from a purely sporting point of view I cannot consider it an overwhelming success. I trained a lot, that cannot be questioned but whether it was the right sort of training… I suspect not. I clocked up more kilometres in those four months then I did in my entire second year as a Junior, but as a crazed Belgian man told me ‘you must have pain in training to not have as much pain in racing’, perhaps some of that is lost in translation but the principal was that for the future a more focused and harder training programme, as opposed to just mileage is needed to ultimately succeed. So that is my brief if slightly harsh summation of this season.
The off season is never quite the rest period you think it’s going to be, for the very pinnacle of the sport they have their contracts sorted and they can watch the leaves turn brown without having to be constantly checking emails, hopeful that next years team has just come knocking. For me this is the time of year to sit down, update the palmares and make a list of which teams I hope will offer me a place for next year. I actually like this part of the year, sometimes I think I should be a writer as opposed to a racer, but journalist stuff can wait where as racing is a young man’s game. Being a true Brit, I naturally under sell myself, this seems to be a British disease where we are so modest that every achievement was down to good luck or any other reason rather than the fact that we were just great on the day. Once the C.V is typed it’s time to send it off to half the Pelotons management and hope something decent comes back. Give it a couple of days and the responses come back, the uninterested teams tell you that you can ride for their team, all you have to do is buy your own kit, make your own way to races and basically act as a free advertising board for them. The interested teams offer more, free kit, entry fees and if you’re lucky, a bike. My thanks for the translation of my C.V go entirely to Google translate, a truly wonderful and free service.
Every year I watch the road season end, mostly I’m mentally worn out from juggling work and late season racing, this year has been slightly different though, I’ve done 38 races but haven’t raced for a month now so my batteries are better charged than previous years. I get the annual irritation to do cyclo cross, it’s like an itch that I can’t get rid of. The idea of ‘cross’ is better than the actual racing. I watch the likes of Sven Nys make it look like poetry on the bike with more bikes than my entire garage at his disposal. Once I don the knobbly tires it is more like Anne Widdicombes performance of Swan Lake, but like I say the idea of this relights the competitive fires and with Autumn upon us I am hoping to dust off the old bikes and have a bit of a go. Just a quick congratulations to a couple of guys I used to race with, Luke Rowe and Andrew Fenn who have both just been announced as fully fledged proffesionals in the highest tier, well done lads!
Hopefully if things go to plan I will start with a couple of cyclo cross races later this month so check back later this month for the thrills…but probably more spills of my first cyclo cross appearance in 4 years!
