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Euro Road Champs

After a bad race last weekend, I hoped to make up for it at Euros. It was held in Hooglede Belgium and was 140k, consisting of 40k straight then 8 finishing circuits. I prepared well with lots of recovery and was ready for the start in Oostende- but pretty nervous. We had a good team as well with Joe Perrett- who won the Euro time trial!, George Atkins, Sam Harrison, Tim Kennaugh, Pete Dibben, and Jon Mould (an me).

It turned out to be a strange race. I crashed about 10k and managed to smash my head so hard that I have lost all my memory from the crash to about 60k in! Joe Perrett (European Time trial Champion!) thinks that I tried to bunny hop a roundabout and mistimed it. That pretty embarrassing considering I'm supposed to be doing mountain bike too! I must have just been on autopilot for 40k. Apparently I was asking Pete were I was and kept forgetting stuff- weird!

Anyway I finally started getting my head together with 3 laps to go and decided I needed to cover all the moves. Darren, our team director, kept shouting for us to work for George Atkins, so I marked all the moves in the last 2 laps so that he could do something in the sprint. I felt really good! My form must be coming along nicely. Coming into the finish I was looking for George so I could lead him out but I couldn't find him. I ended up 32nd, two places behind George as we were too far back going into the sprint. I think the reason we didn't get a good result was lack of communication. It turned out George was cramping with 3 laps to go, so it might have been better if I had tried to go with the moves in the last laps rather than simply nullifying them.
This picture is me on the front on the last lap. I have good morale now because if my form is coming along nicely after what seems like ages of suffering like a dog! Hopefully I can convert this to a good result in my mtb races coming up, including the national champs in innerleithen. Then build on that so that I am super fast for Tour of Wales!


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