Inter-Club 25 Vs Redmon CC

Brian's pre-event pep-talk. 

Ok, so we had not won this inter-club event in a while, quite a long while, and it was deemed time to get it back. Queue a stirring war cry, reminiscent of Braveheart, from our Club President to the racing members of the club. 'Freeeeedooooooooommmm!!!' Errr, no. 'Get entered into the Old Portlians 25 and be faster then the red men.' I was not aware of how this event works. For the uninitiated, quite simply, the times of the fastest six riders from the two clubs are added up and the best overall time wins. The sixth scoring member of the winning team is the one who picks up the trophy on behalf of the club. Simples.

So we had the nucleus of a pretty handy team. In particular, Marcus and Stuart would be our men at the pointy end of the field; two guys who would normally get under the hour pretty comfortably and set competitive times for Redmon to have to chase. Unsurprisingly, fate would have other ideas. Marcus had a One Direction Concert that he had to go to (I kid you not), while Stuart decided to give himself food poisoning in the week before the event. That would mean that it would be down to the rest of us to do this thing, but hopefully we would still be in with a shout. Simon Trehearn had set two pbs already in the week before, so he was on very good form, while Russell Williams and David Watt were also flying, with all of them able to worry the hour mark on a good day.

And it was a really good day! Not a breath of wind and warm; the day felt pretty fast. Thankfully, Stuart was able to turn up and while not firing on all cylinders by his standards, still recorded a 1:00:01 (or a 59:61, whichever way you want to look at it!  ;-).  Arguably, the performance of the day belonged to Simon Trehearn, recording his first sub 1 hour ride (59:22). He put it down to his new skinsuit but I think the months of hard training he has done is a greater reason for this improvement. I was hoping for a pb and was delighted to take a big chunk off, just ahead of David Watt, riding his first 25 and achieving a 1:01:05. John Beer (1:03:05) and Joe Bertorelli (1:04:43) rounded out the top six and a win over Redmon.

On top of this, Jake won the Ladies race with a course pb and Mike Morley set a fastest time for a long time. Commiserations to Russell Williams who went off course and surely would have probably been riding evens himself; and to Philip who also unfortunately dnf'ed.

Thanks to all the riders for the Phoenix who started and made this a great event for us and to Frank, Judy, Ron, Doreen and Lisa for coming down to support.