Time Trial / Time Trialling / TT

Both @Sam and @gofasterstipes have been complaining about low entries for open events, leading to cancellations recently.

Are numbers down across the board this year?

There were 5 entries for the 1st round of the classic series late March. 4 riders started (inc. myslef) - I didn't podium :)

Had an entry refunded after low entries for a Spoco late March. There were ~50 entries for the same event the year previous.

Although I'm still doing it, I've certainly fallen out of love with it. I don't travel outside of my district to TT as it's too much faff and money, and as a result feeling a bit bored of the same old courses. There's also the fact that my kit is a few years old now, so to 'keep up' would require a decent financial outlay for what is maybe 10 races a year. Would much rather put money into my road bike and kit as it sees much more use.

Having a young family means that Sunday mornings are precious to me - I'd much rather get in 3-4hours of quality riding by 10:30 instead of waking up at 5am to drive to a 20min race and then home again at a similar time.

From my perspective the third lockdown really wrecked my love of time trialling. First two I was still loving the turbo, but by the third, with no races in sight, I just couldn’t motivate myself. I turned instead to road riding and much more mtb to re-find the fun in cycling. I’m currently miles off normal power and so racing doesn’t really appeal at the moment. Also as Pifko says, young family means the inefficiencies of travelling to race 20 mins (when you could get a few hours in nearby in the same period) seems pointless at the moment.

I think by next season I’ll get back into it but for this summer I just want to have fun. No idea if that’s a trend that is wider than just me.

On our club forum there very little chat about open tt’s anymore. The odd announcement about some other clubs promotions (and the last one there was the east Surrey hard riders in spring) but no real conversations about racing or kit at all. Club tens seem a bit patchy as well when a few years ago we’d almost have a full field every week. Road racing seems to genera chat so people are racing. Sad times.

Are numbers down across the board this year?

Apparently, probably more so for opens than club events. MDCC have been averaging 20+ on Thursday nights, but High Wycombe got barely over 50 entries for the Wilkinson Sword on the H25/2 last Sunday

Yes for us... all our results are online so I arbitrarily looked at the last 7 events this year and we had an average of 13 riders per event (max=19, min=9). Taking the same period of last year (n=6 events, +1 cancellation), the average number of riders was 38.5 (max=47, min = 31).

For me the reasons are the same as several others... baby, time etc. but this can't be driving the overall trend. A few guesses as to broader trends might be:

1) The ongoing expense of the arms race - a few years ago it felt like some time, home testing and some judicious second hand parts could elevate you to near the top of the field in terms of aerozzz, but now I feel like you need 5k just to begin. Maybe this has always been the case and I'm just grumpy because I'm no longer in the group who can afford it but it's my perception.

2) road safety - I get the feeling a growing number of people are getting pissed of with the dangers of riding on the road. I've now got very little enthusiasm for racing on big roads with big lorries, or small roads with cars pushing past on every blind bend. it's definitely intimidating to novices and I no longer encourage my friends to come along and have a go anymore.

3) local road events restarting - last year we had a lot of riders in our road categories, now we get just one or two on road bikes. I think this is because the local crit series has restarted after a COVID hiatus and so many of the road riders have gone back to those events instead.

I'm sure TSTR will tell us that all of these issues are as old as the sport itself, and I'm sure he's right but just some of my reflections.