Dave Scott and I rode the Anglo Polymers road race promoted by St Ives CC on Sunday 11^th June. This was a 90km 3/4s race run as part of the ERRL over an undulating but not particularly hilly course just north of Huntingdon in near perfect sunny conditions. 

The race began with a 9km neutralised section to take us out of Huntingdon up to the course. This moved along quite briskly until 3 riders went down a few places in front of me which did nothing for my confidence. This didn’t augur well for the main race but as it happened all three riders were (I think) able to continue and it was the only spill of the day.

The flag went in as soon as we reached the course and the pace rocketed immediately on the wide flat starting section.  The bunch was strung out into a single line and when I downloaded the figures from my computer later that evening I saw that we hit 66.9km/h at one point.  Fortunately the racing settled down once the road narrowed and started climbing and Dave and I both found ourselves towards the rear of the bunch which wasn’t great. I found myself having to put in big efforts coming out of the corners and I wasn’t able to move up because the road was too narrow. Once the road opened up again I saw Dave move up the outside of the bunch so I decided to follow him to get a better position and see what he would do. I nestled in about 10 riders back from the front and I could only watch in awe as Dave flew over the top of the leaders and went off down the road. This provoked a reaction from the lead riders and just as Dave was caught I decided to have a go myself – I’m still not sure what I was thinking. I drew one other rider with me and we rode 2 up for what I thought seemed like a respectable amount of time but was probably less than a minute before we were caught. Both Dave and I then tucked back into the bunch.

Near the end of the second lap I found myself drifting to the back of the bunch again until an oncoming van on a narrow climb caused the rear group to stop completely.  I never really recovered from this and although I regained the bunch, the next time it accelerated I found myself out the back again and I couldn’t regain the group. To my despair, the commisaire’s car passed me and my race was effectively over.

Dave however settled in for the rest of the race which was dominated by an excellent two man break that gained about a minute on the group and was out for about an hour and a half.  In the end it was too much to ask of the two escapees and they were swallowed up with about 10 km to go. The finish was pretty spectacular. It was on a section of road so straight and wide you could have used it as a runway. Despite the instructions to stick to the left hand side of the road the 55 or so riders left in the race (out of the starting field of 80) were spread across the whole road as they entered the straight. The organisers had obviously anticipated this and two marshals further up the road prevented any unfortunate incidents with oncoming traffic.  Luckily for the line judges there was a photo finish camera which gave the win to Dieter Rowe of VC Norwich and placed Dave in a very respectable 40^th.