Today's race was out along the false flat in what started out as very cold and extremely foggy conditions. The race start was actually delayed by a bit just to get a bit of the fog to lift as the visibility was extremely low.
Verity gets the 'hardwoman' award for riding out to the race start from Mt Stromlo, Anna and I on the other hand, were feeling a bit soft upon hearing of the -3 (or depending on which weather app you use, -6) temperatures.
Although there were initially some plans for a team time trial approach, the exodus of all the other women from the Elite category leaving only us three, convinced us to use the ITT as a practice for the ACT championships next weekend so we decided to all do it solo.
We started in order of registration, Anna, Verity and then me. Possibly the ride out and then the big chill waiting for the start of the race had tired Verity out a little and I passed her on the first hill. Anna took a fair bit longer to catch and I worked fairly hard up the unforgiving false flat (so named because it is just enough of a climb to be soul destroying).
I caught her somewhere around after the spot where the juniors were turning around and i was pretty pleased to hear her say 'Go Rach!' - unfortunately i didnt have a single bit of energy for speaking so i couldn't say anything at all..
My next hurdle was the hotdog turn which i knew was coming soon was the hotdog turn (around a witches hat in the middle of the road, a basic U-turn). I am really bad at these - and have gotten significantly worse since i fell over sideways recently while turning a corner at slow speed. That feeling of the bike tipping over sideways has really stuck with me :(
But I slowed right down, FORCED myself to look around the corner to where i wanted to go, and miraculously - made the corner.
And boy was that a 'turning point' the last section to the turn had actually been downhill but the headwind we were pedalling into had made it feel like a climbing repeat!!!
Once turned, even though it was uphill, I was flying. I wasn't more than 150m past the run when I passed Anna so I knew she wasn't far back. Determined to open the gap up a bit more, I tried to really put some pace on at every opportunity, and maximise my speed by staying in the drops, since I'm yet to try using any proper TT rig (for the uninitiated the key difference are TT bars which put your body into a more aerodynamic body position, shaving seconds off your time).
I kept pushing all the way back until I realised with horror that I had to do another Hotdog turn - but this time in front of a whole group of guys :(
It got pretty wobbly, but fortunately I stayed upright and began pushing back up the hill. On the final lap out I tried to keep the pace up as much as possible, never quite sure how far back Anna was. The last hotdog turn, as I flew back up the hill I was releived to find I had opened up the gap quite a bit, and all that was left was to hang on to the lead.
It was really helpful to have other Viking teammates like Brad Drew, Paddy Quiggan and Chris Drew out on the course, every time I saw them it gave me a bit of a boost and when they passed me I used them as a goal to just try and keep them in sight in order to hang on to the pace.
The final stretch I went for a sprint and clocked just over 51km/hour heading for the finish line.
Felt pretty proud to get a result after what has been a really tough week where I wasn't able to train properly.
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