The Epic Cymru 5 day stage race has been kicking off over the last few days. Aidan Bishop is on the ground to report on the racing action - here's what he had to say about day 5... The final day’s riding and racing was set to return us from Aberdare back to Margam Park, essentially doing Monday’s route backwards and with this meaning we got to race down the long timed climb… payback time!
Keeping an eye on the weather forecast on my phone last night and it showed 100% chance of rain, thought it would be too good to be true! So up for breakfast with everyone in the main tent and sure enough the rain had started already, meaning today was not going to be a pleasant day in the saddle.
All riders gathered and huddled together under tent and awning cover waiting for our call to line up. After a short delay due to the weather affecting things we set off for Margam. Another nostalgic moment for me as we climbed out of Dare Valley Park and essentially up the old DH course I raced on decades ago in the Pedalhounds races, except back then we walked up where as this time a train of riders were pushing their 1 x 11 gearing up the steep track. After a large amount of climbing and traversing the hill tops we arrived at the start of the first timed section wet through, not many smiles to be found already.
ADVERTISEMENT
The first half of the section was wet rocky rutted track, mostly of a very gentle downhill gradient but with a bit of a climb also, which didn’t seem anywhere near that steep when we got to roll down it two days previous!? Once we met the singletrack trail (closed off for the race) the timing mat was crossed for the start of the ‘Trail King’ part of it. Fortunately any riders I caught down here promptly moved for me to pass, but unfortunately once halfway down the trail I felt my rear tyre go flat, gutted! I decided to gamble the rest of the day and keep pushing on, thankfully my tyre and rim held strong by the bottom but a lot of rolling speed was lost. Whilst putting a tube in to get me going again, it would have to happen on wet day too, I discovered my error…. I never converted my rear wheel to tubeless, rookie mistake!
Pumped up hard, my wheel was good to go and so some re-fuelling at the feed station and off we went. More re-tracing of the previous route and up a long fire road climb with some singletrack trail in between, a lot seemingly into the wind and driving rain, most wanted the day over by now. Block out the conditions and push on and pretty soon we arrived at the start of the second and final timed section of the day, a bonus being that the finish line of this was the finish of the race, at last. For many riders we had already covered about 10km with our rear brake pads down to the metal so trying to charge down some trails with metal rear pads would be interesting.
Check out the rest of his videos here.
You can read more at BikeRadar.com
via BikeRadar All the latest from BikeRadar.com http://ift.tt/1JtxRLb
No comments:
Post a Comment