race report by peter.

cyclo-sportif race at pickering brook.

• over 500 riders entered for the last event of the season.  this is an increase of 100 over last years event.  it is a surprise really since this one is so close to home, i thought that a lot more would be coming out to play.  there were more riders at the swan valley event, so i am guessing that this one suffers because the course is described as hilly.
• the wind… what happened to the hot day, it was pretty cool when we started but didn’t take long to warm up.  it wasn’t like we needed armwarmers and vest.  and really i am just complaining because i didn’t take a jumper with me to the start.
• three laps of a 25km circuit on roads that we often use for the sunday hills ride.  especially the stretch between karagullen servo and pickering brook.  any ride we do down towards armadale or the kahuna, will always follow that road to get to the coffee shop.  i would not be able to count the number of times we have ridden along it.  the little circuit around repatriation road had been added to our rides a couple of times recently mainly because we had this event coming up.

  

• team of 8 – ryan, brendan, mike, michael, stu, jerry, bruce, peter.  there is a maximum team size of 9 and a minimum of 5.  it is rare for us to field a full team and even harder to get a good set of evenly matched riders.
• teams off at 30 sec intervals meant that there would always be groups in front of us to chase down.  it also meant that there would always be groups that we would have to pass which can be tricky.
• michael gets a flat before we leave the car-park (for a change).  he has a habit of flatting during these events, so hopefully this meant that we got that out of the way early.
• lorraine also turned up to support the spr boys with evil brownies.  i had one and it was probably the reason why i didn’t run out of energy during the race. 
• we started before the spr2 team (so we had no-one important to chase).  the start order of the teams is usually reverse ability with the faster teams starting later.  as we had not really raced these events before, the organisers did not know where to start us and put the second team starting 6 minutes behind us.
• from about the halfway mark of the first lap, bruce was really struggling.  he was finding it hard to keep the pace and couldn’t catch his breath.  there was a burnt out area on the course and we suspect that he developed a bout of asthma from breathing in the smoke and other crap in the area.  we changed tact and had six of us rolling through in two lines while bruce sat a the back with ryan pushing him to keep the pace up.  at the end of the first lap, he peeled off and went to the medical tent with lorraine.
• we kept the pace up for lap two and made good time passing other teams.  it was getting more congested now as the 2 lap and 1 lap teams were on the course.  this meant that some of the groups we were passing were alos getting passed by other groups.  made things tight with riders coming the other way and general traffic on the road as well.  on a couple of occasions we had to pass some cars that were unable to get around a group of slow riders.
• start of lap 3, brendan realises his rear tyre is going soft.  we are passing by the pickering brook school and he starts bouncing it to check the pressure.  from behind, it is clear that it is going soft… fast.  we go as far as we can, but he pulls over and i was expecting that he would change it.  instead, ryan pulls out a gas bottle and they just pump it to get it hard again.  we are off with minimum delay.
• get to the turn around at karagullen and head back up the hill with brendan’s tyre slowly going down.  we pull over again and ryan adds more gas.  i was unsure whether they had enough so i grab my saddle bag, but the whole mount and everything comes off the bike. i then had to shove it all back in my pocket, wasting time as the rest of the group heads off.  ryan waits for me and drafts me back to the pack.

  

• we head up the last climb before the finish and onto the nice smooth hotmix.  brendan says that he can feel the valve every time the wheel rotates so it is pretty flat.  ryan and he stop to gas again, while the rest of us just slow time it up the hill.  some of the groups we have past are now passing us.  once ryan and brendan catch back up, we all go hard to get to the finish.  team u and i get caught up amongst us and we all finish in one big group.

• finish in around 1:57 according to brendan’s speedo but we will wait for the official confirmation.  each team captain was wearing a transponder which they will work the times out with.
• as we regroup after at my car, lorraine pulls out the esky and provides everyone with a nice cold coke and brownies.  we will be working on getting a spr sun shade to congregate around for next years races.
• rob wins the leadership jersey for his work in keeping the spr2 team together and setting ground rules as to what constitutes a push and what is just touching another man’s bum.
• all up a good hit out especially for spr2 as they had not raced this format before. 
• don’t actually know if this is an easier way to write the blog.  seems to take just as long.