There are LIMits, you know#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:23:00 +0000

I apologise first to anyone reading this who's also on the WoW list, because unless the editor changes it I will be using exactly the same pun in the title of that article as I did above

Yesterday morning there were two things I really didn't want to do, but knew I'd have to: the first was get out of bed, and the second was skate the LIM. That negativity was to stay with me all the way through warmup, the start, the first corner, to the bottom of the downhill, where someone clipped skates with me at 40km/h (guessing) and I went flying. At which point, having scented blood (admittedly all of it was mine, exiting through scrapes on my chest, thigh and elbow) I developed a bit more of an Attitude and went off looking for someone to take it out on.

So for the first third of the race I was skating mostly solo - had a couple of short drafts from a line including George, and a couple of laps working together with Alexandra Geen[1] (Birmingham Wheels), and then I saw my chance when the lead line came up the hill behind me on about lap ten, hopping on the back as it went past. Then it really became great fun: there was a mix of teams and a couple of individual skaters there, and it was nice to be able to learn from a competitive paceline at close quarters, but secure in the knowledge that as I was a lap down and thus posed no threat, nobody was going to make me fight for my place ;-)

Dropped off the lead line again on their last-but-one lap on one of the breakaways - I wasn't going to burn myself out when they had 1.5 miles and I had 2.5 miles to go. Eventually finished in 8th place with 1:32:12 (winning time was 1:27:35) which I think is Not Bad for a race which included a fall, and in which my only real goal - indeed my only reason for entering - was to better last year's DNF.

Sad but true: If I had joined FISS I could have had a podium (third place, British Championships Senior Male). Bah. On the other hand, it's the only FISS event all year I was interested in (the rest is all track stuff) and there's unlikely to be any more either, so thirty quid for a single medal is probably not that compelling. What's more distressing is seeing the amount of toe wheel wear on my right skate - I didn't think I was toe flicking, but clearly I still need to work on my fore-aft balance a bit.

fn1. Got some grief for this, in fact, since we apparently both passed my teammate Tanya - competing for the same category as Alex - during these laps: if I'd left Alex sooner, we could have had an LSST second place there instead of third. Gah