Back to Cross

When I broke my arm in June last year my first concern was simply how long it would be before I could ride Cross again. I had a vague notion of being able to ride some of January races, but as it was, the arm was just a bit too beat up for that to be realistic. So I was patient. And finally I'm back racing.

Maybe not as fast as I'd have hoped. We got gridded alphabetically, so I was pretty far back, and so went for it off the start, getting myself into the top 20 of the 67 riders, before settling into a rhythm I thought I could maintain. This meant I went backwards a bit, and the race was finished (I think anyway) a lap early, so I had a little bit left in the tank at the end. More heartening was that the arm wasn't an issue at all - not a single rough moment with it, it was more my lower back that was giving me some bother in the latter stages.

I was so so nervous in the morning and driving down to it, but once on the start line it just felt like normality again, and I'm now going to have to try and build to be better than I was before (that's probably already the case, but once the Series starts proper I'm aiming for more).

The hurdles were probably at the lower limit, hence a few people taking the bunnyhop route; though I adopted the more traditional dismount/run/remount technique in the extras - something which serves me well as one area I still appear to be able to make up time in.