Last Sunday morning was the 2011 NSW individual pursuit, with Pat and I being the DHBC representatives for the day. The pursuit has always been one of my favourite events and it has a long as prestigious past in track cycling. It was Pat's debut at this discipline and I personally think he put in a brilliant ride on the day, though he may disagree with me
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I haven’t had the best build up for the event, with consecutive crashes at the Scott and the fixie century limiting my training. Normally for a pursuit you try and ride to a preplanned schedule. This prevents you going out hard and dying mid race, as the quickest pursuit are normally those ridden at a constant pace. I didn’t have either a schedule or a person/coach to indicate it to me and as such I just rode off feel.
My qualifying ride was against Jordan Davies, a really nice rider from Penrith. I rode quote a conservative race, but surprisingly i felt really good on the bike (which is unusual for a pursuit). Normally in these sort of events you spend at least half the race thinking things along the lines of "god why am i doing this", "I'm not going to make it", etc. But in this case i felt good right up until the end, even managing to catch Jordan on the last lap. I rode a time of 4.52 which was enough to qualify fourth. Given how good I felt at the end i knew that I certainly could have ridden faster.
I hadn't expected to make the final and as such had bought no food with me, so after scavenging some gels of other rides (thanks Jordan) I had the bronze medal ride off against Ben Harvey. Ben qualified in a 4.42 and is a far strong rider than I, getting a bronze for NSW in the Australian national omnium last year amongst other victories. As such I knew I was in for a difficult ride. I went out hard, I know that in the qualifying my first kilo was a 1.14, i think i did around a 1.11/12 in the final. At the two km mark, i was almost 6 seconds up on Harvey and was on the same straight as him. Which surprised everyone including the NSW commentator. Sadly it was about this point that the legs began to die, with the lack of endurance training taking its toll. My breathing remain fine but I simply couldn’t quite hold the higher cadence. Ben ended up beating me by a good couple of seconds in the end, with my final time being 4.52 again. If id maintained the original pace I could have easily ridden a sub 4.40 time, so it’s a good sign for three weeks time for the omnium.
Photos thanks to Mark Gunter. (I'm sure my mother will end up buying a couple)
Pat looking focused.
Me attempting to eat my tongue in the qualifying.
Feeling the pain in the finals
Least Benny looked like he was trying hard for once
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Other photos http://markgunter.photomerchant.net/gal ... page/3/tag
Cheers,
Alex