Kelly cycle coaching athlete, Liz Hall (ParkTrent Cycling Team) recently flew to Perth to compete in the UCI World Cycling Tour Qualifying Time Trial and Road Race.  She came home with a silver and a gold.  A great effort Liz.  Here is her race report on how each race unfolded.

Report By Liz Hall.

The UCI World Cycling Tour is the amateur version of the professional World Tour and includes the World Championships for Amateurs (19-34) and Masters.  There are Masters rainbow jerseys on offer at the championship final each year.  The UWCT Perth Tour is a qualifying round and consists of 3 stages – a 20km time trial around Rottnest Island, an 81km circuit road race around Perry Lakes and a hilly 106km gran fondo from Fremantle to Kalamunda.  All three courses were also used in the NRS Tour de Perth.  Podium place getters and the top 25% of finishers in each UWCT category qualify for an invitation to the World Championships (in Slovenia in 2014).

Time Trial

There was aero bling aplenty on show for the Rottnest TT. After 40-50kmh winds the afternoon before, I was relieved that we had an almost still morning for racing, with only a gentle breeze of 13kmh.  My start off the ramp was good, with optimal gear selection to get me out of the barricades.  After negotiating two sets of railway tracks, I was able to settle into the aero bars as the course wound around the south side of the island.  The course was quite technical, always up or down, and with a few tight twisty turns. On one early hill I had to move to the bull horns to stand up over a steep pinch and a tight ‘S’ bend and a right-hander into a narrow track near the end also required me to get off the aero bars, but otherwise I was pretty much able to around the course down on the bars.  I was well and truly in the ‘hurt’ box with a few kilometres remaining.  I had no way of knowing how I was going against the favourite, as for some odd reason she had been off first. As I approached the finish I could hear Gav and a few locals screaming encouragement, so I dug deep and pushed the last uphill section into the finishing barricades as hard as I could. After slumping over the bars and a roll around to cool down, I found myself in the hot seat, and ultimately had the fastest time of the day and the gold medal.

Liz accepting her gold medal for the TT.

In the starting gates

Road Race

The road race was a tricky affair, as all the women under 50 raced together.  The largest groups were the under 35s (challenger class) and my own age group of WMAS4. The strategy was to keep an eye on your own category competitors whilst racing smartly in the pack.  One WMAS2 woman (a former ironman competitor and strong time trialler) slipped off the front after 3 laps of the 8km circuit. There wasn’t enough power in the remaining WMAS2 group to chase and the challenger class women decided to let her go as it didn’t affect their own race.  I managed to position myself well in the bunch.  However, recent crit racing accidents back home and an unfamiliar peloton made me a little tentative into the corners.

After 5 laps, the course changed to turn up a very nasty KOM of 7-12%.  The challenger women lit it up the first time on KOM, but I managed to stay in contact.  The second and third times up the hill saw me temporarily dropped from the main chase group, but I was able to get back on before the longer drag up into a headwind along the Indian Ocean.

Finally the elastic broke for me and the other remaining WMAS4 competitor.  This time, she got back onto the small chase group and I didn’t.  Despite eventually being unhitched herself on the run to the finish, I was unable to catch her and finished with the silver medal.

Gran Fondo

After having already qualified for the worlds, this race was not such a pressure cooker for me. The gran fondo had a neutral mass start out of the heart of Fremantle before the timing kicked in around the 22km mark.  It may have been ‘neutral’ by name, but it was very much on like donkey kong as we sped headlong towards the hills.  The front bunch was being driven by pros from the Tour de Perth, including eventual overall gran fondo winner Travis Meyer.  As soon as neutral was over, the bunch snapped into 3 groups, with me in the third! I worked hard on the front of a small break, picking up some small groups along the way, and despite poor organisation, we eventually caught the second group just before the first climb of 9km.

Two of my category competitors had been hanging on the back of my group and hit the first hill with me. My legs felt heavy, feeling the effects of the previous 2 days of racing, and both those competitors passed me at a steady pace up the climb. I managed to catch them after the climb, rode with them and a couple of guys through undulating national park terrain for a while, before finding my legs and eventually dropping them. With most of the climbing done, it was a far more enjoyable ride to the finish. Without knowing what women were lucky enough to be in the front group, I had no way of knowing where I had placed overall or in my category.  As it turned out I was first in my category and 4th woman across the line. Taking into account my placings in the TT and road race, this also gave me the WMAS4 GC win.