{"id":1853,"date":"2010-08-05T23:02:17","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T22:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/?p=1853"},"modified":"2010-08-05T23:02:17","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T22:02:17","slug":"manchester-midweek-mtb-madness-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/?p=1853","title":{"rendered":"Manchester Midweek MTB Madness – #5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0I have not done any XC races this year, nor any cyclo cross races and have been missing the buzz of head to head racing. With a couple of months before the next World Cup race I thought I would try and find a couple of XC races to do. As I work on the outskirts of Manchester, the Midweek MTB Madness series organised at Clayton Vale Country Park, in the Shadow of the National Cycling Centre, seemed ideal.
\nHeld every two weeks throughout the summer tonight was the 5th<\/sup> race in the series with one more to go.<\/p>\n

The event was well run with plenty of marshals to keep things safe for the 38 riders of all ages who started the race. The 10 min lap design uses a mixture of fast cinder tracks, short power climbs and whipping singletrack descents, all designed to bring a smile as the course winds its way around the Country Park. The race format is 40 mins plus one lap.<\/p>\n

The start immediately goes into singletrack after just 75 metres and I got a bit stuck behind some riders for the first minutes but soon overtook them and settled into a head to head race with up and coming junior rider, Northwest MTB Centre’s John Mackellar. We played cat and mouse working together for the first two laps until eventually I pulled ahead once more to keep the lead for the next 3. He seemed stronger on the climbs and I pulled away a little on some of the corners getting better lines but we were very well matched.<\/p>\n

On the last lap I started to get tired and backed off a little, but he quite rightly stayed tucked in behind looking for his chance to get away. On the granny ring steep climb, mid lap, he got it when I stupidly got off and tried to run the steep climb. He pulled about 40 metres on me which I could not get back on the rest of the lap.<\/p>\n

Still I was very happy with 4th<\/sup> place and enjoyed the swoopy single-tracks and the great feeling of getting the very fast lines right through the blind entry points to the forested bits.<\/p>\n

My legs, arms and hands though zinged all the way home in the car from the overhanging nettles on one of the climbs. On every lap they seemed to encroach more and more. I wondered at the time if they would start to lose their bite as time went on but they didn’t seem to!<\/p>\n

I’m looking forward to going back in two weeks time, hopefully with an entourage of Pozzoni work colleague bikers in tow to give it a go !<\/p>\n

Results and a few photos available at http:\/\/www.taptiming.com\/results\/hfril\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0I have not done any XC races this year, nor any cyclo cross races and have been missing the buzz of head to head racing. With a couple of months before the next World Cup race I thought I would try and find a couple of XC races to do. As I work on the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Manchester Midweek MTB Madness – #5”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-competitions","category-mountain-biking-cycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1856,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions\/1856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}