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@The_Seldom_Killer
I'm not sure how it was for you southerners but up here in Yorkshire it was bordering on tropical. I was sweating just casually trundling kit the short distance to the pits and I think I have a touch of sunburn. It's November for goodness sake, this isn't cross weather.
I did a big fell race on Wednesday so was feeling a bit crap coming into the weekend. A spinny ride yesterday got most of the ache out of my legs but I was still a bit trepidatious about today. With a lot of rain recently I was expecting it to be pretty sloppy but yesterday and this morning really seemed to have dried the course out.
The start was a big sprint across a flat field and then straight into some hairpin bends. I decided I was no longer going to just sit at the back and work my way through as I have from the start of the season and fought for a line right from the whistle. Quite crowded and stuttered at the hairpins but polo skills helped me hold place and as we headed off to the bankings I was surprised to see I was doing pretty well for me. There were three slopes I had to run up but, fortunately, most of the people I was racing ran them too. Had to stop mid third lap to pull a lump of mud out of my eye which meant I lost all of the hard work I had been doing in the first two but seemed to be able to pull almost all of it back in the next lap. Ditched the knot of riders I had been battling but by the time I caught up with the next guy it was the last lap and he woke up enough to hold me at bay.
Annoyed with a few niggles such as the mud in eye, a couple of shoddy dismounts and putting up the pressure on the tyres too high. Still feeling like I'm progressing from the start of the season and seem to beating more people. I might get good at this one day.