Barry Elcombe Memorial Race

This annual race is held over 135km on the Kirdford circuit south of Guildford and is unusually run on a Wednesday. This screamed out to me as a good opportunity to grab some points with a potentially smaller, weaker field and take advantage of being on school holiday. All I can say is there must have been a fair few sickies or “working from home” calls today as there was just about a full field including all of the usual suspects I see week in week out. So much for easy pickings, but nothing easily come by is worth having, right?

The race started fast and my plan was to try and get in the early break. In spite of being pretty active on or off the front nothing I was in stuck, and eventually a group did escape with your author still firmly in the bunch. I wasn’t too keen on this so made a couple of big efforts to try and bridge, one on my own to get to Stephen Dring (Team Echelon) and Kevin Knox (Dulwich Paragon) who were also up the road trying to bridge only to reach them at the point they were giving up the chase a bit. This was the pattern for the early part of the race: a few attempts to bridge all chased down.

As the laps counted down a larger chase group slipped off containing some strong riders and I was left in the bunch getting increasingly frustrated. There was a good chase at times, but not always organised and more like repeated attempts to get away that were followed; It helped keep the speed up and the riders up the road within bridgeable distance. On one fast descent there was a car stopped in the road we had to take evasive action on, and five minutes later the commissaire stopped the race (second race in a row!) to allow it to come together. The upside of this was it allowed a good look at who was up the road, and revealed they were only twenty seconds ahead.

The race was re-started with the time gap and immediately a couple of guys nailed it to get across successfully. Myself and a few others tried to do the same but it was becoming obvious legs were tiring. Not content to see the race slip up the road I dug in through the finish with three laps to go and took a couple of other guys with me. On checking back on the descent we had got a surprisingly big gap on the bunch. Four or five minutes of solid riding soon had us safely in the front group, and finally I could think about a result rather than cursing myself for a tactically poor first half of the race.

Including the ‘bridgers’ the lead group now contained some twenty or so riders, and was not working well at all. With two laps to go there was little evidence of through-and-off and the attacks started to come. Nothing got away until Dan Kogan (BMC) and Gareth Hewitt (Team Sabbath) chipped off and stayed away. Behind, in spite of numerous efforts (mostly very well marshaled by the Hewitt’s team mate) the remaining break stayed together, and mindful of my poor positioning on Sunday I went for it up the final climb into the finish, and was looking good for 5th place until an AW Cycles rider threw his bike and put me back into 6th. Up the road Hewitt had taken the win, I hope he thanked his team mate for an excellent supporting job.

Tale of the data:
135km
3hrs 16mins
41.0kph
165bpm av HR
259w av power
313w norm power
303 TSS (329 whole workout…)

To finish off, respect to Dani King of the Vision 1 team who was always near the front of the bunch and putting a lot of blokes to shame in getting involved with the action!