13

Pembrey Win!

With not much luck on my side lately, snapped chains, broken shifters and just about missing every breakaway in most of the road races I’ve done this year, I suppose my expectations shouldn’t have been at their highest. Despite this I was optimistic that I was up for a good race tonight at Pembrey racecourse. Off the start I made sure that I was in a good position to mark every attack and to make sure that if a break was to get away, then I would be a part of it. Sure enough in the opening laps, a break of five riders, myself included, got away from the main pack. unfortunately during the effort of our break pulling away, it felt like my pre race meal hadn’t digested fully and I was having stomach cramps and feeling pretty sick.

Still early on and I felt in no doubt that I was the weakest of the break. That made me believe that my streak of bad luck still hadn’t shifted and this race wasn’t going to go my way. Luckily for me the longer the race went on the more settled my stomach became and the better I was feeling. With 7 laps remaining, George Richardson (Abergavenny RC) who everyone had marked down as the one to beat launched the first attack. I knew that George would be a hard man to beat after a string of good results, however I didn’t want him to control the race.

So with this in mind my tactic was to attack him, instantly after he attacked the bunch and try and run him down, in the hope that none of the others in the bunch would want to make attacks of their own! After about 5 or more of my counter attacks one stuck and I had a gap with 3 laps remaining. I knew that this was it…..all or nothing.

I heard a saying once by famous Irish cyclist Stephen Roach, who explained that “in a road race, you have to be prepared to loose to win”. For that moment when I had the break, those words just made sense. It was a case of going as hard as I could knowing that there was a chance that I could get caught and blown out the back. I stayed tight on all the corners, tucked up as small as I could on the straights to be more streamlined and gave it everything to make it as difficult as possible for any would be chasers to run me down. I managed to pull away and take the win on my own with a bit to spare.

When I crossed the line I was really pleased with the way in which the race turned out and I was pleased to get my first road win of the season on my Kiron Scandium.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 9:16 am and is filed under Lee Williams, Team Wiggle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.