Time to get a race license?
After my brief but exciting trip to racing in the Smithfield Nocturne recently (which I want to write about soon) I do really feel the urge to have a go at a proper road race. I’ve read about the racing at Crystal Palace in Matt Seaton’s book “The escape artist” and I felt my heart rate rising just reading about it. It sounds brutal in the extreme. I also fancy trying out Hog Hill which Magnus recently had a go at. This also means a 100k round trip to get there, race and then get back, further compounding the pain.
Digging through my Instapaper feed earlier I also found another description of racing at Crystal Palace by Andy Waterman which did the Twitter rounds a while back. I felt a similar kind of increased heart rate to Seaton’s piece and slight sense of unease at the pace and pain involved in it. But in the midst of all of that this paragraph in particular made me smile.
Week-in, week-out, the circuit makes fools of visiting elite riders who turn up boasting triple digit VO2maxes, free bikes and a sense of entitlement, only to be put in their place by the local hero, invariably a middle-aged man in mountain bike shoes who knows Palace, and the way the races there unfold.
I love the sound of this! I’m going to go and watch the next one with a view to getting my race license and having a go. It’ll be fun getting dropped out the back I’m sure but everyone has to start somewhere.