Nick Clarke reports on the cracking early season race training sessions
Around Christmas Phil Rayner and I looked at the announcement of a NCRA Spring Road Race Series and wondered whether the time might be right to revisit some winter training sessions that Ray Taylor had set up around 10 years ago. These had had a huge impact on motivating people to start racing. Given the success of last year’s chain gangs and the Bruntingthorpe Races we had a feeling that we might be able to get some people interested and from there encourage them to consider entering racing.
The club gave us the go ahead and through January and February we have been running training sessions from Church Langton on Saturday morning. Each week we have had 20 or more keen enthusiasts battling the cold, the wind and some horrible rain with enthusiasm, determination and no little strength. Happily on the final ride we were rewarded with a beautiful sunny day.
We have had relatively inexperienced riders being supported by some much more experienced, we have had young riders and older riders and each week we have had a significant number of female riders.
The sessions have focused on various skills associated with group riding, all designed by Phil – single file pace lines, thru and off, changes of pace, varying lengths of turns, how to ride in the wind, climbing hills, how to recover etc. I hope, by doing all that we have also given people some confidence and self belief that they know how to ride in a race situation, as well as a little more fitness. Some people may also argue that the sessions have involved riding around the Welland Valley to near exhaustion each week
With the NCRA series now starting next week the training sessions have come to an end. Hopefully these events have given people some fun and some skills and fitness that will feed into the season ahead. From my perspective the attendance, enthusiasm, openness, encouragement and sense of camaraderie have surpassed expectations. Thanks all for making it so much fun, have a great season and hopefully we will set these up again next year.
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