The forecast wasn't looking great, fairly windy and bloody cold to say the least, racing below 10 degrees is never really pleasant, but with temperatures only being around the 2-3 degrees mark it certainly wasn't pleasant at all.
On the start list we had the normal suspects of Conall Yates and Pete Tadros, Pete being a former winner of the event. Added into the mix was Steve Dennis, Richard Prebble, Dan Sadler and Steve Irwin, so a good quality field. I expected given his recent form and results that Conall was the most likely to win, though I hoped for a top 3 placing, though given the field this might be wishing as well. At least as the previous years winner I got the honour of starting last, normally this would be good as it would have warmed up a bit, but not today, it never really got warmer as the day went on, and only got windier.
Foolishly I had seen riders riding up and down the road whilst I warmed up on the trainer, bared legged. I had been warming up with knee warmers on, but I hate racing with them as they always end up starting to roll down and become annoying. I decided as I got to the start I would also go bare legged (by heck it was cold just waiting to start). I had a bit of a joke with the timekeeper and said I wasn't expecting to do too well, but would still aim to beat the course record (more jokingly than anything else really). Once off the wind chill really started to show, and it wasn't long before they were frozen, so not the wisest move on my behalf.
I settled down into what I thought was a good effort power wise (again first event after winter training, not 100% sure of the power I could sustain for an hour or so), but with the sheer cold, I found it difficult to sustain what I thought should be possible. Felt good pushing on up over the hills, but when the speed went up found it disconcerting to see power dropping off even though I felt I was pushing as hard as I could. I had a thought that I had refitted the chainrings a few days beforehand, and perhaps they were just settling a bit, so I did a few zero offset resets during the race and power seemed more normal for a while.
The outward stretch down the A24 should have been a nice tailwind, though to be honest it never felt that way (maybe the first race at a high intensity was a real shock to the system), and in fact at the bottom end it felt like a headwind. I soon realised as I started the return leg home it had been a tailwind and the last 7 to 8 miles were going to be into a headwind - deep joy. I had hoped to reach Rusper Hill with a 28 mph average, but just fell short of this, with this and the headwind home it wasn't looking like a particularly good ride.
Once up Rusper Hill (in the small ring this year, after near coming to a halt last year in the big ring), I just tried to keep the average speed as high as possible. The road through Rusper and onto Newdigate has some lovely sweeping bends and is constantly up and down. Surprisingly the average speed seemed to be fairly static and even going up slightly on the really fast parts. The East Surrey RC give you a miles to go countdown from 5 miles out, it was here I just really tried to up the effort, whilst trying to calculate what sort of time I could possibly do. Once I got to the 2 miles to go marker I realised that I wasn't going to beat last years time (not really surprising given the cold and the wind), but I could get pretty close to it.
Riding as hard as I could for these last couple of miles, with the burning in the legs and lungs (at least I was warm by this point), I crossed the line with a 1:07:05 and I was very pleased with that, it wasn't a course record as expected but at least I have given my best and I gently cruised back to the car to get out of the cold.
Once back at the car the start timekeeper saw me and made a joke about me being a liar, I asked why and he said I had set the fastest time, I wasn't sure what anyone else had done time wise, but I was a little shocked. Once in the HQ and looking at the result board I saw that I had managed to beat Conall by 19 secs and Pete Tadros by 26 secs. To say I was well chuffed is a slight understatement, I never expected to win, and to win the event 2 years in a row I felt was a pretty good achievement. It was great to get 2013 off properly with a win, and a win at such a classic event. Many thanks to Blake Coxon (the organiser) and the East Surrey RC for putting on another great event.
Photo Courtesy of Mark Hopkins
1st Steve Berry - Team Swift 1:07:05
2nd Conall Yates - Ingear 1:07:24
3rd Pete Tadros - Ingear 1:07:31
2nd Conall Yates - Ingear 1:07:24
3rd Pete Tadros - Ingear 1:07:31
4th Dan Sadler - RT316 1:09:43
5th Richard Prebble - Node4 Giordana RT 1:10:17
6th Steve Irwin - Kingston Wheelers 1:10:28
Next event was to be the CTT TT Series Round 1 (Cancelled by snow and ice), more to follow on that.
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