Midlands Champs and update.

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BY: Richard Jones

Published: 30th May, 2013

Its safe to say the racing season is now in full swing. The true start of the summer for me is the start of the local Friday Night Summer series. The weather for these races so far has been anything but summery but this doesn't affect the brilliant racing and buzzing atmosphere. 

Playing in the FNSS swamps. 

Two weekends ago was the Midlands Champs just outside Stourbridge in the Wyre forest, a venue that has never been visited before by the race scene, so I was really keen to get down there and see what it was like. 

An early pre-lap showed just how good the course was. There was plenty of climbing although mostly short and sharp except from one longer fire road climb towards the end of the lap. The singletrack was dry and mostly rooty with a mix of fast descents and slower more technical features. 

The start was a brutal fire road dash with Dan Fleeman taking up the lead from the start. We quickly funneled into the first section of singletrack and one after the other, riders attacked and tried to chase the leading bunch of Dan, Alex Welburn and Dave Collins with Mathew Dennis was just a short distance behind. 

I settled onto Chris Andrews wheel who was setting a blistering pace. I managed to come through to share the work a few times but after just a couple of laps Chris' strength showed and he had managed to gain a good advantage over me. 

I carried on applying the pressure hoping not to be caught from any of the chasers behind, however it was no surprise when Lee Westwood joined me. Lee had been recovering from an injury and is definitely finding his form once again. 

Photo credit to Hollie Bettles. 

Riding laps with Lee again was great and reminded me of the years I raced sport and expert where races were usually against Lee and there were certainly some good battles along the way. 

In riding together we had managed to rejoin Chris Andrews however it appeared something wasn't right and unfortunately Chris had to with draw from the race. Lee and myself continued to ride together until the last lap where Lee upped the pace. He was riding the singletrack extremely well and I was struggling to hold his wheel. Yet again the elastic shortly broke and Lee was riding into the distance. 

I at this point had very little to retaliate with, I quickly began to loose all energy and felt myself slipping into that "Dark" place. I carried on as hard as I could to see myself to the finish and rolled over the line feeling very low and tired. This is something I very rarely feel but a coke and a bottle of Accelerade R4 recovery perked me up and brought me back to some form normality. 

This race came after a solid block of training and a Friday night race so there was no real surprise that I finished feeling a little low. None the less I finished 5^th with Lee pulling a 1 minute lead over me on that last lap! Impressive stuff. 

Since then I have been continuing to train well and am now really looking forward to this weekend's National Race at Hopton Woods. It's a course I really enjoyed last year and cant wait to get back there. 

Good luck to all at the races, see you on the other side! 

Richard Jones. 

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