Race Report – Conrad takes the win for Devon!

Camel Valley C and TC ‘10’

Sunday saw the Camel Valley C and TC 10 – ‘C and T’ standing for Cycling and Triathlon.

It was one of my final events of the year, and incorporated the annual Devon versus Cornwall bun fight, that sees the top ranked Devon riders batter Cornwalls slower equivalent.

The event was scheduled for the rarely used S103 course at Goss Moor in Cornwall – essentially a mixture of old and new A30 road, with just the 6 roundabouts to circle.

The start sheet arrived with instructions that the course had been amended to remove some of the roundabouts, and now included a slightly downhill start. I figured it had the potential to be quick.

I arrived nice and early at 0700 on Sunday morning – calm conditions and nice and sunny. This was looking good.

I tracked down the organiser to check my interpretation of the course only to be told it had reverted back to the original course, which was now confusing as I had no idea. He also muttered some other stuff about some other people, and some words which I can only assume were Cornish.

 Route established, warm up completed and feeling good. I arrived at the start – no one to push off, and time keeper looking fairly relaxed in his deckchair leant in the hedge some way away. Feet unclipped I was counted down, and I was off and quickly up to race pace. Power was strong, but every time I hit a roundabout the power and speed was just killed. On the 2 mile sections in between the turns I was pulling pretty big wattage and trucking along at 38 mph in some places. It seemed like I was on a ride, but each 180 degree turn onto the old A30 caused the average speed to decay. I dug deep and crossed the line in 19.51.

I span back to the HQ and after speaking to a few folk it appeared I’d broken the CR by 8 seconds, so was obviously pleased with that.

After a short while there was a fair amount of head shaking, general disagreement and pointing at Garmins going on. It appeared that there had been an issue with the syncing of the time keeping watches, meaning the entire field were given times 8 seconds slower than those recorded.

20.00 was my given time, 11 seconds clear of my nearest rival. Personally I wasn’t concerned about the time, as it didn’t affect the result in any way – but it did mean that I missed the CR by a second though. Bummer.