I’ve never been very good at praising myself. Achievements don’t land, or sit, for very long. It’s something I’ve learned the hard way, and whilst my tendency to just brush things off once I’ve done them is my default so in an effort combat that I’m just going to say this.
Well done me!
Yesterday I rode in my first ‘sportive’ event – a timed, closed road cycling event, not a race but not a ‘family fun’ ride either as there is a minimum time/speed – and whilst I wasn’t worried about being able to complete it, I did a lot better than I thought!
I rode the route on 1st August on a dry cool early morning, a few weeks later and the roads were slick with overnight rain and it was several degrees cooler, but thankfully it wasn’t pouring from the heavens so I didn’t need full waterproofs to survive. The start was a little chaotic, mostly because it wasn’t clear how to get to the start line.
Because there are a few thousand riders, the organisers used a field to funnel people at the start, with riders allocated to a specific ‘wave’ of start times. This was based on your estimated completion time (I’ll come back to that in bit) and is a perfectly good and oft used way to organise the start at an event like this. Alas not everyone, myself included, got information about how to get to that area and so a couple of hundred of us just headed down the road to where we knew the start line was thinking that there might be directions once we got there.
There wasn’t, so we had to wait around until the organisers sussed it out. It meant that instead of my starting time being around 7:45am, it was a full 30 minutes later. 30 minutes of standing around which wasn’t a great way to start the ride. We all eventually got going though, and with the start line a little way along the road from where we’d been waiting it’s not like we lost any time…
My starting wave, based on my predicted time, was the last one, wave E. However given that this ride was actually the one postponed from 2020, when I hadn’t really been cycling all that much, it’s safe to say that my predicted time when I submitted my entry – 4hrs – was a little off…
That said, it’s hard to compare times between when I cycled the route previously, and how it went yesterday – I started and finished in different places each time – but it was the official timing chips handed out and stuck on your bike that told the true story; for the 40 mile route I finished in a time of 2hrs 16mins and 18 seconds, and came in 97th place out of 589 riders.
I’m still not really sure how to process that as I didn’t think I’d even be in the top half of finishers let alone in the top 100. It’s not like I was pushing myself, we had wet and slippery roads to contend with, and I really was just out to enjoy the morning, gaining some experience of riding in a sportive, and just enjoying being out on my bike.
I’m already wondering what the next challenge is of course but, for a change, I’m going to let this sit a while, and be proud of myself because I should be.
As a sidenote, I was also gathering donations for Muscular Dystrophy and set an initial target of £400 (cos 40 miles). Currently I’ve raised £709 which is mind boggling and wonderful. So grateful to everyone that donated.
Good for you. I’ve never cycled that far in one go.