Women's Team Series Round 2 – Twickenham road race

After missing Round 1 due to me gallivanting around Mallorca, I (Nicole) was quite nervous about making my Team Series debut in Round 2 at the Twickenham road race. The start list was daunting to say the least – World Junior Road Race champion, British Track champion, 3 elites, girls half our age in the Olympic development squad. At least I had 5 of my pink team mates on the line with me, plus a couple of other Pearson supporters, and the ever-present Nellie our mascot.

While some of the other teams arrived at race HQ in their team cars, complete with support crew, spare wheels and rollers/turbos, Team Pink rolled in, as per usual, from the train station, backpacks in situ. We did a quick warm-up on the road and discovered a biting wind had emerged for the morning, then headed over to the race briefing. The roll-out was from a grassed carpark, over some gravel, onto some side streets, then on to the race course proper. 60 tightly-bunched girls clipping in whilst trying to negotiate grass and gravel was surely a recipe for disaster, although everyone seemed to get through unscathed.

My goal for today was to hold on to the bunch as long as possible. It was quite a fast moving one. I had reccy’ed the course on Friday night with Vikki and felt it was quite slow and “sticky” and constantly dragging uphill. I hardly noticed the inclinations in this bunch. Everytime I looked at my bike computer (not very often) it said something around the 40km/h mark. Being only my second road race ever, I had to concentrate really hard to hold my position. It did feel like I gave up my wheel a little too easily at times, as younger, more experienced and confident riders seemed to slot through gaps that I didn’t think were there! I tried to stay in the first half of the bunch to decrease the likelihood of falling off the back, and as the race progressed and I continued to feel good, move towards the front in case a break went that I could jump on the back of. I didn’t even realise that a couple of girls had gone off the front on the first lap, not that it mattered to me, I certainly didn’t have the fire-power to go off with them or chase them down.

The course transitioned onto a smaller hillier loop for the final 5 laps and I was still with the main pack feeling good. Everyone by now seemed to be racing for second place, which meant the bunch crawled up Staple Hill each time rather than attacking as I thought might happen. I positioned myself nearer to the front thinking there was one lap to go, when in fact there was two! Oh well. I wasn’t in such good position on the actual last lap, and was halfway back when the sprint started with 200m to go. However, everyone seemed to go backwards up the last little incline and I managed to sneak into 13^th place!! Super excited about that.

Natalie Creswick from Mule Bar Girls won by a mile, soloing the last 5 laps, with Lucy Garner in her Rainbow stripes winning the bunch gallop for second. Two of my pink team mates also finished in the main pack, with the others not far behind, placing us 7^th in the Team points for this race and 9^th overall. So proud of Team Pink! Bring on Bedford.