W2GC 2014

What a Cold morning, I think my ears froze as soon as I stepped out of the car at Woodford.

My only goal was to break the hour mark, last year my time was 1:00:11 so I knew I could do it.
I started at the very back of the 30-39 (Wave D). As soon as I crossed the starting line I started moving up the pack and continued to do so along the firetrail. I rode every climb at a slow and steady pace to not burn myself out and used that reserve of energy to pick my pace up at the top of each climb.

Approaching the Helipad I hooked up on the rear of another rider to get a breather from their draft. I believe it was from here that set my downfall. I got to comfortable. The rider was putting out a good pace but multiple times I was having to dab the breaks to not run into the rear of them. I did try to overtake a few times to share the lead but each time he shifted across the firetrail to maintain the best racing which kept blocking my overtaking attempts. I sat on the rear of this rider until halfway from the gate to bennetts Ridge where we caught upto another rider. This rider jumped onto my rear. I finally made an overtake and I was now taking turns leading with the new rider we had caught upto, unfortunately the rider I had Tailed for so long fell off and we had lost him. Along Bennetts we caught upto another rider who joined in and another rider had caught upto us. The lead kept rotating to the end of Bennetts sharing the load. It was near the end of Bennetts that I looked at my clock and saw I was at 59mins, I knew then I would not make my goal.

I crossed the line with my Garmin reading 1:00:45 and knew the offical time would be a couple of secs less. I found it very unusual with the offical results showing my time as 1:00:58 as that was 13 secs more, but on Marathon Photos, My certificate time is 1:00:40 which is the time I beleive to be most accurate.

So next years goal is to break that elusive hour mark