Dave Rayner, Covid and baking?

This winter has been a strange one, mainly down to a few factors which are out of our control. It is strange once you are not allowed to do something all you want to do is that thing. In this instance that 'thing' is group riding, particularly reliability trials.

"Whats a reliability trial?" I hear some of the southern readers saying, well first of all I was shocked to find out that some areas of the UK do not have such events. But in essence its a race for some, a training ride for others. Picture this, its a miserable mid-January morning, 8:39am and you have arrived at a cold, damp village hall. You are pleased to learn that the fast group is off at 9am, not too much waiting around. Enough time to say your hellos and admire the selection of cake which will be patiently waiting for our arrival in a few hours time. "FIRST GROUP LINE UP" you hear the organizing clubs chairman shout, "that's us isn't it?" I turn to my dad. "Yeah I guess it is" he replied fear in his voice, "if I can get out of Bridgnorth okay, I'll be okay." he thinks. Then we set off, not a second before 9, not a second after. A few riders hang around for a few seconds so they get the best Strava segment time, it's got to be done. The short run out of town then up Newton bank, a steep main road climb with a road surface the equivalent to a farmers track. The guys at the front turn the gas on, it is full gas and we have only been riding for 4minutes. One by one riders fall off the back, 'dispatched' is how we would describe them. A group which was once 30 turns to 10 within the space of 30 seconds. Over the top now and look who is sat at the back 'collecting tickets', dad.

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Anyway that is enough story telling, more about this winter. It has felt like too halves mainly dictated by my employment status. I got a job, who'd of thought it, working in a bakery near Bridgnorth. 5pm-12,1,2,3am. I thought "yeah I can work in the night, train in the day". How naive I was, the 40 hours of standing up alone was enough to exhaust me, training simply didn't happen. My stint at full time work really opened my eyes to have fortunate cyclist USUALLY are. I never really appreciated how truly mind-blowingly expensive cycle sport actually is. Seeing a pay slip at the end of the week and thinking well, I do have enough money to race my bike but I haven't been able to train so what would be the point, is worrying to me. It's not a surprise there is not a wide spread take up in cycle sport, its simply to expensive to millions of people in the UK.

This finical autonomy has made me appreciate the level of help that some charitable organisations very kindly give to people. This is why I would like to say a massive thank you to The Rayner Foundation for supporting me this year I simply wouldn't be able to do what I do if it wasn't for them. And of course Pedal Potential, I am going into my second year of being supported by them, hopefully this year I will have some real world results to write about in this blog. I am also working on a new website at the moment, just need to get over the France to take some photos in the sun!

Talking of France, many of you already know but for those who don't, I will be racing for the French DN1 team, AVCA Aix-en-Provence. Based in, your guessed it Aix-en-Provence. This opportunity to race in 2021 I am incredibly grateful for, as my gut feeling is there will not actually be that many races this year in the UK, which in my opinion is a real shame. I do have a set date on which I wish to travel to France, I have all my paper work in order, ticket booked and I have started to think about what I need to take along with me for my 90 day arrangement in France, thanks Brexit. Its a mine field when you start looking into EU/French visas in the end I thought 90 days is better than 0, perhaps I will be able to obtain a visa for France in June when I return to the UK, but I feel this is increasingly unlikely.

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I will end this blog entry with a snippet from a draft blog I was writing back in March when everyone was full of optimism about this upcoming season:

On March 1st I raced the Severn Bridge Road Race E/1/2 Nat B near Bristol. This was my first race of the season and it was the first race for a lot of people. It was twitchy to say the least, lucky there was a total of zero crashes.

Towards the half way mark there was a small group up the road for two other riders, I managed to bridge across to this group to make a trio up the road with a small advantage of around 25-30 seconds. This later got brought back, but then the next time over the top of the courses one and only climbs of around two minutes a break of around 9 got away, thankfully I made it into this group. We worked well together and managed to get a very large gap of maybe two minutes or so on a chasing peloton of 60 riders. Coming into the last lap I think everyone was feeling there legs tiring.

I was looking around the group trying to work out who had the best sprint, who was going to win if we all got to the finish together. Let just say I wouldn't have won the sprint, so I had to go early. Heading up the climb the last time, we were all going full gas for the two minute effort. At around the half way point of the climb I attacked opening an advantage of around ten seconds on the now group of four. I held this advantage to take my first ever road race win. Pictured below:

Nick Phipps