This years National Cyclocross Championships race was hosted by Southern Cross CX in Christchurch, with the race held at the Motukarara Raceway. I took the win in the M30 category, which was cool, but not what I wanted. This race was always going to be frustrating for me, and I ended up adding a few more frustrations with a sub-par performance.
Race Report
Enough grumbling!
The course at Motukarara was a good one: a nice mix of grinding power sections, fiddly slippery turns and a solid run-up. All up, I think the course suited higher powered riders rather than those with high power-to-weight, which is always good for me as I am not light!
I flew down to Christchurch the day before the race and hadn’t given myself time to pre-ride on that Friday, so had an early start planned for Saturday to practice before the 8.45am cut off, with my race starting at 10am. Unfortunately I didn’t get much sleep on that Friday night, and hadn’t had good sleep all week with a sinus issue after that seems to be a follow on from the fever caused by my latest COVID booster. This lack of sleep meant I was pretty fatigued come Saturday resulting in my heart rate being about 10bpm higher than usual for a given power during the roll out to the race. I then wasn’t able to get my heart rate up high either: I topped out at 168bpm during the race when I would usually be up closer to 180bpm, and max out around 192bpm.
Being a nationals race we had a proper call up to the line and had our tyres checked for width. I got called up first and lined up in the middle on the front row. Vaughan lined up next to me. Vaughan and Simon back in Wellington had been telling me that there might be some stiff competition and I was looking forward to getting to race people.
I got a good clean start, but didn’t go all in from the line so that I could keep an eye on the other riders. Vaughan stomped it off the line and I settled in next to him for the first few hundred metres. Vaughan entered the first corner first, then somewhere in the next section I took the lead and set about pressing on the pedals out of the corners. When I looked back a few seconds later I saw I had a good gap already. From there on I was on my own.
I settled in to the rest of the lap, riding hard, but never really attacking out of the turns like I have been through the rest of the season: looking at my power for the first lap I was consistently exiting corners at around 500-600W, way down on my usual 900W kicks. In hindsight I was a little demoralised that it had been easy to get a gap, and while I told myself that I should be pushing on I never really did. Given my HR and health, I probably didn’t have those top powers really either.
There were a few technical sections on the lap that required a bit more focus, The first being a spiral on grass after we got off the raceway bog. The spiral was particularly slippery in our race and I never really got it as well as I wanted. After that was a boggy stretch across the grass, with a drainage channel that wanted to sap your speed. In hindsight that would have been a simple hop to save energy and maintain speed rather than flopping into the soft stuff! This was followed by a short section of gravel access road leading into a grassy and slightly rocky section with a deep bog at the top. I was riding the bog all race, but always wondered if it would have been faster to run.
Coming down from the bog we went over some rocks, and with my tyres at 20psi for grip on the slippery sections, I was picking my line carefully and not going full noise to avoid damaging tyres or rims. We then rolled through the pits and turned left then right into the run up. I was pretty happy with how I ran this, and my dismounts and remounts were good, but there wasn’t much grip up the run up and foot holes hadn’t really formed yet, so I was taking very short strides and couldn’t run full speed. This was consistently where my heart rate got to its max value for the race though, so I was clearly pushing myself a bit up here, but still couldn’t get out of tempo HR.
After remounting and tackling a tight and slippery 180 degree turn, we had a nice fast section along the top of the bank with a slight wiggle. In that wiggle there was a root that I hit my rim on on the first lap, to avoid damage I slowed and avoided it on subsequent laps. We then turned hard-right onto the descent back down to the “arena”. This ended with “carnage corner”, a long left-hander with limited grip. This was pretty slippery for the morning races, but seemed to improve during the day. I was quite cautious through this and probably lost quite a bit of time playing it safe here, but I had no good reason to pin it.
The corner continued into the pair of hurdles. I still haven’t got the confidence in my bunny hops to be hopping in races, so I took a tight line and ran the barriers every lap. Again, I was happy with my dismounts and remounts, so that was a positive for the race, but it was cool to see Craig (Elite winner) hoping right up until the last lap. It was clearly faster to hop.
We then entered the final section of the lap which was a series of chicanes on slippery grass. I rode these on the first lap, but felt like I was losing a lot of speed. I then slipped out and crashed on one corner on the second lap. The lack of traction also meant that I wasn’t able to push hard through here which I found frustrating given that my heart rate was generally low. I thought that I could go faster, push more, and be more consistent if I ran the corners and uphills and rode the descents between corners, so I did this from lap 3 to the end.
After lap 2, I could see that my gap on Hisky was fairly stable, and looking at the lap times I was only gaining about 10s every lap on Hisky. For context, at Huttcross I have been able to open gaps of a few minutes on Hisky, so either Hisky was riding great, or I was on a bad day! I think Hisky was probably riding great, but I was definitely not that on it as well. I decided that my lead was safe enough and that I would just try to ride clean consistent laps from here on in. At no point was I close to my limit, but I don’t think I had much motivation to push more.
In the end I came through to finish about 1 minute up on Hisky who took the M3 class and about 4 minutes up on Vaughan, who was second in my category.
It was great to spend the rest of the day watching the other races, but I was pretty frustrated watching the elite race and not being part of it. I don’t know how I would have done, but I don’t think I would have won! Comparing laps on strava it looks like I was losing more than 20s a lap on the sections that were very slippery in the morning, but improved during the day. The rest of the time that I lost I think was probably lost by not kicking out of the turns. I like to think that I would have been able to challenge some of the elite racers, and hopefully I will get to prove it to myself one day.
Next up is the final Huttcross round this Sunday. If I’m feeling good for I hope to go hard at and try and find my limit, but at the moment I am still a bit under the weather after the week of bad sleep last week, so I might have to just take it easy. After that I have a bone graft scheduled to fix some damage in my jaw from a bike accident 18 years ago. Hopefully I will recover from that quickly and be ready to go for some racing in the UK in September!
Why wasn’t I racing elite?
I feel pretty silly being unhappy with a win at the national champs, but there is a reason for it: I wanted to be racing the elite race.
There is one condition to being able to race elite at the national championships: you have to be a New Zealand registered rider. To be registered as an NZ rider you need to be an NZ citizen. I have lived in New Zealand for 12 years now having moved over to do my PhD in September 2012, but I haven’t yet been granted citizenship.
The road to getting citizenship is fairly long and you (generally) have to go through two residency visas (temporary then permanent) before being eligible to apply for citizenship. Being a PhD student does not count towards the time requirements for this process, so the clock started in 2016 when I graduated. I then went through the work-to-residency scheme which took another couple of years, then had to wait to get permanent residency, before finally being eligible for citizenship.
I became eligible to apply for citizenship in early 2023, but I had an altercation with a car driver resulting in them running me over resulting in a police investigation which further delayed my application until August 2023. Since then (12 months ago) my application has been sat in a queue and has yet to be seen. Hopefully I will get citizenship in time for next years champs race, but there is no guarantee.
When I put my application in, the expected timeline for processing citizenship applications was less than a year so I was hopeful that I would be able to race. I then set about training to target this race. Before this year I hadn’t been able to train consistently because my research usually requires me to spend a couple of months in the field without a bike, and doing long days meant that I lost fitness and motivation. I was finally in a position to hand off field responsibilities to other members of my group and focus on training for a year. Don’t get me wrong: I love my fieldwork, but I still feel like I have things I want to do racing bikes.
Over the last year I have put a lot of work in and have seen my fitness steadily improve (apart from one bout of sickness) and I have really enjoyed it. However, in April I checked in on my citizenship application and had the realisation that time had run out for getting my citizenship and changing nationality with the UCI. I was unsurprisingly pretty gutted by that: it felt like the thing I had been working towards had been taken away from me before I even had a chance to show what I could do, even though there was never any guarantee that the process would happen in time.
After being glum for a few weeks and generally being miserable to be around (sorry Emily) I decided to refocus and still go to national champs and try and learn from the experience: particularly I wanted to ride hard and compare myself to the elites to see what more I had to do. I don’t know if Emily realises quite what impact she had when she told me to just think of how much fitter I could be next year - little does she know what plans I have now! I also had the opportunity to plan to do some racing around seeing family in the UK, so I changed my training to target those UK races rather than national champs.
So: I found myself not peaking for national champs, racing in the M30 category about five hours earlier than the elite race, and hoping to learn something from the experience. I think the main thing I learnt was not to overthink things before the race and get better sleep!
Banner photo: Blissfield Photography.