Thanks to a late sign up we had 8 riders this time! Mike Taylor, Alex Clare, Tom Burgess ,Billy Willson, Martin Cochrane, David Goodall and Mike Gloyne .
This week we’d discussed beforehand and we were going to go all out, with the understanding that some of us would get dropped.
We set off hard into the first descent, we managed to group together which was good. From there we hit the first two climbs hard based on Tom’s recce. Unfortunately, we lost 2 riders straight away, but the guys stayed on to give us some support. As the lightest A rider I tried to do pull up the 3rd climb, and everyone stuck with me so we were looking good.
Most people took turns on the front on the flat, with the exception of those just hanging on! As we hit the next climbs disaster struck. Tom was struggling to breathe, a worried Dave put in a huge effort and accidentally dropped everyone, Mike was struggling and my DI2 ran out of charge! That all led to big gaps at the top of the 2nd climb – eventually Alex/Tom caught me downhill (whilst I was trying to plug my DI2 in) and they went through to catch Dave too.
I finally got my gears charging and caught the group. Conscious we were down to 4 we made a big effort to stay together – I led up the climb again and everyone stayed on! Now we were on the flats, Dave suggested we take 500m turns each so that’s what we did.
We finished in just over 45 mins and now we’re back in the PL!!
