It was a great weekend at Bike Radar Live in Donington Park. The weather was great, crowds were fabulous, course was mint, & competition fierce. I showed up on Friday afternoon after making the drive from the MBUK headquarters in Bath. Doddy, Jamie, and myself had a 3 hour drive getting us into the venue around 2pm. I built up the Tranny and had a short practice session on the course with a few others.
Sat. morning was the first practice session, followed by the qualifiers mid day. I was feeling OK, a bit tired and woke up with a headache, but actually thought I would do better than my 6th place qualifier. Looking back I think I know where I was loosing the tenths of seconds, made a few changes and got some rest before the night finals.
I was definitely feeling a bit better from a nap and the changes I made seemed to be paying off, beating Kovaric who qualified 4th in the quarter finals and Scot Beaumont who was the second qualifier in the semi's to match up against Gee who has qualified first.
I had a great 1st run going and just made a couple small mistakes which cost me the first round win, losing to Gee by just .1 seconds. The second run was the same. I felt good and just got a bit off line in one turn which caused me to be off for the next turn. Gee was riding great and with a course like this one you couldn't make any mistakes. Peaty told me afterwards that I looked really fast in sections, just not everywhere. Anyway, it was a good battle between Gee and I, but he came out on top.
Saladini was also riding good against Scot Beaumont in the small final and edged out Scot by just enough on the second run to take the 3rd place.
Sunday was a bit of chill day for me. I did a few laps on the xc course, watched some amazing dirt jumping, checked out the Martin Ashton show which featured you tube sensation Danny MacAskill and Sam Pilgram, which was sick to watch. Later in the day I decided to give the WattBike a try. The guy running the program kept asking me to do it, so I decided to give it a go. Man, only 200meters, but it was super hard. From a dead stop you go all out and the WattBike tells you everything. Your peak watts, average watts, if you were using one leg more than the other, your time for 200meters, etc. Jamie Staff holds the watt record of just over 2100 watts, myself, I did like 1689. I have not worked on power in a year since I am not doing any 4x stuff anymore, but sure I would still be a ways off Jamie. He's probably got 40lbs on me too though. I guess my time was the fastest for the weekend at 9.51sec.
Anyway, Monday now and just hanging out at Peaty's house for a couple days before heading back to CA. Greg Minnaar is also hanging out as those two are heading to Ft. Bill on wed. for WC#4.