Astwood '10' 27th August 2025

This evening ’10’ came after a fortnight of dealing with a right leg injury (bizarrely incurred while mounting the tandem) and a longer period of family related stress, both significantly denting my training, all mixed in with a few hospital appointments.

Last week, I rode a club event on the Cranfield course, which I won with a narrow margin, but at some cost to my right leg’s recovery. Frankly I didn’t really pull out a strong performance that evening. So I was keen to see how I was going via this evening’s event.

Unfortunately, I have to report that I finished with 24:43, at least half a minute below my expectations. This was a result that wasn’t just down to the rather autumnal conditions, but mostly to the lower power I was able to crank out. The conditions were definitely a bit autumnal, with a fairly twitchy wind at times.

There were points during this event where I felt I was going well, but they were few and usually followed by a lower power section such as a descent from which I didn’t seem able to ramp the power back up again.

I finished in second place, but probably that’s because one of the other riders suffered a technical misfortune with 2 miles to go. Next we’re back on the Cranfield course for the last evening event in our series. It’s a bit earlier than usual owing to earlier sunset.

Here are the data from the ride - click to enlarge.