Cycling Australia Junior Mountain Climbing Championship, 2011

An U15 athlete of ours, Ben Andrews, writes about his experience at the Australian Hill Climbing Championships on the weekend.  Ben loves his cycling and is very discipined with his training.  He loves nothing better than going on weekend rides with us to Kinglake and Humevale, where he gets to practice his climbing and other important bike skills. Here is his report.

Last weekend (April 2 & 3), I competed in the 2011 Cycling Australia Junior Mountain Climbing Championship at Mt Buffalo.  Known as the “Alpe d’Buffalo Junior Tour, the Junior Men’s U15 event comprised an 8 kilometre Individual Time Trial on Saturday afternoon, followed by a 23 km road race up Mt Buffalo on Sunday morning. Both events went towards the General Classification time.

The time-trial was on the Saturday afternoon; it was a nice temperature of 20 degrees. And it was not too windy.  My warm up included 5 minutes easy spinning on the windtrainer, then 3 minutes at 60% to 90% and finishing with 1 minute as hard as I could, then resting for 1 minute. I repeated this 3 times. 

I felt bad in the time trial but when I got back, Helen told me that sometimes the worse you feel the better you do! I finished fifth, which was better than I expected.

On the Sunday morning, I rode 6 kilometres out to the start of the road race with Helen at 7.30 am, before doing some quick spinning efforts. It was cold, and my hands were freezing.

I felt good in the road race for about three-quarters of the climb.  For the first 10 km there were no attacks with 3 riders sitting on the front at a fast pace, causing people to drop off.  In the second half of the race there were a few attacks. A couple of attacks split the six of us who were left at the front, but we got back together each time. There was a big attack on a very steep section about 1 km before The Gap (18 km) that split the 6 of us into two groups with me in between. The three riders at the front got away from me by about a hundred metres at The Gap. I kept on chasing by myself, as I knew that there were two riders behind me.

I extended my lead on the two riders behind me, but couldn’t chase down the three leaders in the final few kilometers. I finished fourth in the road race, and in the General Classification.

Saturday morning training with Bob and Helen helped me the most for the hill climb, especially the rides to Kinglake and out the back of Whittlesea.

For the TT, the training sessions I did in the garage on the windtrainer helped a lot, especially doing TT efforts in a hard gear.

Thanks to Bob and Helen for the great coaching.

From Ben Andrews