Cat 4 field

HLS were well represented in this race with Ben, Brian, George, Art, Dean and myself. Having checked out the revised course a couple of weeks back I can’t say I was bowled over by it; it was relatively short at 40 miles and with only one decent hill worth mentioning it was never going to be a true climbers’ race.
Lining up there was still much confusion between some riders as to the exact route of the course and how many times we’d be coming up the hill. The team had talked beforehand and knew we’d only be going up there once which made it a good potential spot for an attack.

One guy soloed off the front in the first mile but no one took him seriously. The pack was riding very cautiously to begin with and there was a real reluctance to bridge up to him. He actually stayed away until near the end of the first lap which I found impressive and also made me think that perhaps it would be possible for a break to stick on this course.
Lap 2: After the rapid decent we took the hairpin left at the bottom and began climbing back up to Lake Welch. A Setanta guy started to set a fast pace but soon started to fade, so I moved to the front and decided to up the tempo. A CRCA Junior, Wei Chen, then came around me out of the saddle and injected a little more pace so I just went with him. After taking a another pull he came alongside and said, “Come on, we’ve got a gap”. Nearing the top of the climb, I glanced back to see we had ourselves a fairly decent lead. I knew we still had just under 20 miles to go to the finish but thought that this was a good point in the race to give it a go, so we upped the pace even more.
Over the next 18 or so miles we worked together at full throttle. Coming back from the Tiorati circle for the second time we saw the chasing pack and Wei estimated we had a 45 second gap; but to be honest it looked less to me. From this point I never looked back; I got my head down and we both continued to take short, hard pulls, with Wei shouting words of encouragement along the way. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we rode ourselves inside out but with about a mile to go were caught by the 30-strong bunch, which included Art, George, Ben and Brian. Fortunately, I managed to catch onto Ben’s wheel (cheers, mate) and sat in until it all kicked off with about 200m to go, grabbing 5th in the sprint.
I just wanted to give a big mention to Wei from the CRCA Junior Development team who was a really strong rider to work with and definitely one to watch in the future.

Cheers,
K