This weekend it was a nice local race, only about an hour from my house, so a leisurely drive up on the Friday afternoon was the plan. It was a leisurely drive up until I tried getting the campervan into a very wet finish field !! Well and truly stuck I then had to get towed in to the field and to a parking place by Dave Pearce and his tractor ! I was pretty pleased that as soon as we had got settled I looked up only to see the next person get stuck and the tractor was needed once again !! The joys of MTB racing in the UK !
Pearce Cycles is a shop in Ludlow who have run races and events for years and years. They are such an enthusiastic couple that have done so much for the support in my area I wanted to support their first race as I was home and had a free weekend.

I managed to walk most of the track before it got really too dark to see anything. It was a very normal Bringewood track, tight in and out of the trees on a very worn almost luge like track ! It was however so slippery it was pretty hard to stay upright on your feet, I had no idea what it would be like on a bike in the morning !

Saturday morning came and with quite a lot of rain overnight I decided to cut some spikes tyres. They were definitely needed as the first couple of runs were so slippery. Throughout the day it began to dry up very slowly and it became a lot more predictable. Race day came and we still had not had any rain so I decided to put some dry tyres on. I did a run but still felt like I could do with the security of the spikes, so swapped back for the race. Both of my race runs went ok, I was not very well warmed up and really felt it after the really hard pedal through the mud at the start. I recovered ok and rode the bottom of the track really well. It was a physically hard track as the mud really slowed you down and you had to work really hard everywhere to maintain your speed. I finished with my fastest time of 2.39min, 10secs ahead of French World Cup rider Myriam Nicole, with Jess Stone, only a few seconds back from Myriam in 3rd place. I was pretty pleased with my riding at this stage in the season. I would have liked to be a bit closer to the winning men