As the first sportive (with exception of London-100) I have ever done, I wasn't quite sure if to take it somehow competitively or just as a group training ride. The answer was presented to me after the first 10km when some clubmates descended furiously and vanished out of sight. At the second climb another clubmate attacked and rode off alone. It did feel like a clubride as all some 50 Dynamos were given the same startslot and we started together. So the story goes that an almost crash made me decide to ride at the front and see if we could get back to our escapees. When we railed them back in, us had shrunk to a group of mere 6-8 riders. Hill after hill the group dropped riders and eventually with 4 hills to go we were a group of three, with last years winner Ben Burns and winner of the year before, Lee Davies. We had a steady pace, worked in equal parts, a really good training ride. Then we lost Lee at the 4th last climb and finally Ben had to let me go and the 3rd last climb. I thought there was only one climb left, but a really steep one followed unexpectedly. I had no idea where I was, there were no riders before or behind me, the photographer at the last climb hadn't even set up his kit yet, so unexpectedly early the first rider came along.
Apparently my finishing time was the fastest ever recorded on this rather hilly course. Surprisingly I was still feeling fresh at the end and still had gas in the tank.
This was a good end of winter wakener and to me proof that the efforts to recover from my August accident injuries started to pay back. 276w normalized power and 375 TSS for the ones interested in numbers.
