Dubai Road Race
James Powers (great surname for a cyclist) is one of our Oman cyclists we coach. He is a Brit who lives and works in Oman with his family. James has been training hard for his first road race, having raced mountain bikes many times before. Here is his report on how his first road race unfolded:
James Powers (third from left)
Report by James Powers.
After feeling really nervous at the start, the race wasn’t as difficult as I feared.
Initially I started off policing breaks until one went away after 10km or so with the right number of our team mates. I then stayed out of trouble until the break was caught.
I then tried to form a break myself a couple of times and after 60km I succeeded. We had 5 away and a good representation of teams of which 3 (including me) took turns pulling.
I concentrated on doing short, strong pulls to not tire myself too much. This lasted until 80km when we finally dropped the hangers on. Unfortunately one of the other guys in the break then stopped working properly on the mistaken belief that we wouldn’t be caught.
There then followed a series of attacks but I managed to prevent anyone from getting away. I managed to put one attack in but unfortunately, we then got caught by the group at the 90km mark.
There was not a great deal left in the legs at this point so I just drifted to the finish as close to the lead group as I could. I was pretty pleased with my efforts [for my first road race] even though [my] 50th place is not exactly a good sprinting effort!
Thanks for reading.