A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

Just a Lille bit#

Wed, 17 May 2006 12:46:07 +0000

BARLOW Daniel
Open roller fic homme - 14/05/06 - LILLE (59)

Arrivé(e) 18 eme sur 161 avec un temps de 00:57:35
Soit 12 eme sur 62 dans la catégorie SEM
Dossard no 343

Informations diverses :
Club : London skaters speed team
Vitesse moyenne : 34,38495
see here

The chief attraction of Lille is that if you have (or know someone with) a car, it's one of the cheaper foreign races to enter. E20 for the registration, £50 for the Eurotunnel (per car), and E40 for a twin room at the Etap. And it's a short drive from Calais: you can get there on the Saturday and come back on the Sunday.

Lille is one of the French Inline Cup races, and as seems typical for these things, they only let you do the proper marathon if you're Elite. The rest of us mortals get some other strange length like 30k, 12k, 22k, or whatever the local organisers feel like - the Paris/Eurodisney race was notable for having changed the Open distance from 42 to 22 via 12. And they wonder why LSST tends to go for the German races more often. Anyway, in Lille, the Open race was billed as 30km, or ten laps of the course. (This is, by the way, the kind of thing it's wise to find out in advance: it wasn't until we were lined up at the start that we finally got confirmation it was 10 not 11). The course was on city centre streets, with surfaces to rival London's (a polite way of saying they mostly weren't all that great: potholes, dodgy tarmac repairs and a certain amount of raised ironwork to make it interesting) and was basically a series of straight roads connected by right-angle turns - one right turn and five lefts.

When I got to the start I was on the second row: by the time the usual pushing and shoving had finished I was on the fourth row and had my right skate walled in by those of three other competitors. The start was unsurprisingly late: having all been ready since 11:25 or so, they kept us waiting on the line until about 11:40. It was also surprisingly clean, in the circumstances: it took a few seconds for the people in front of me to get moving, but being more or less on the left-hand edge of the grid, I could push leftwards and start up the gap where nobody ever seems to want to be. (Side note: judging by the number of people who overtook me at this time, my starts are still slower than they need to be)

More or less by the end of the first straight the pack had become on average two lines side-by-side, though it wasn't yet possible to tell who was in which as they were continuously merging and splitting. The big surprise came at the first (left hand) turn, where the entire group slowed right down almost to walking pace to go round the corner, then accelerated once back on the straight. This became something of a recurring theme on the bends, in fact: although none of the subsequent corners were quite that slow, it wasn't until about the fourth lap that most of the skaters actually started crossing over to accelerate through the lefthanders, and I didn't see anyone at all crossover right.

After the first lap, it more or less settled down into one line, and the following seven laps were just like the second. I ended up towards the back of the pack, because I was being slack at defending my position (actually, mostly because the people in front of me were being slack about defending their positions, but in a best-defence-is-a-good-offence style I should definitely have been a bit more proactive) which probably meant I suffered more from the concertinaing around every corner, but I reasoned that I was comfortable with the speed and knew I had some in reserve, I could afford to burn some energy if it meant avoiding the full-contact skating probably going on up ahead. And there was no point in trying too hard to catch people on the short straights when I knew they'd usually slow right down on the next corner again anyway. There weas even one serial offender t-stopping in the line. (In fairness, some of the turns were up the inside of a slower line and there wasn't a vast amount of room. But even so, if I were that ultracautious marshalling a streetskate I'd never get to the front ... )

Lap ten started just like any other. After the penultimate turn it got a little bit undisciplined again, which seemed as good a time to take off as any: from near the back I came past about a third of the pack, round the bend and and finished somewhere int he second half of the group, for 18th place. I even hawked, although not terribly stylishly. Afterwards I found out that there'd been a three-man breakaway at some point, which I'd missed due to hanging around at the back - they'd crossed the line about three minutes previously. I'd love to find out when that was.

I talked to Hans afterwards. He was in the Elite race and says that there was an attack on every corner there. Compare and contrast ...

PS: if you, like me, multiplied the average speed by the time I spent skating and arrived at a figure greater than 30km, well, so did I. I'm told that the total length was actually about 32-33km.