I’d call it unexpected, how it all panned out. It seems so long ago now, but back in February it was supposed to be for fun. I just wanted to have ago at racing again for old times sake. And perhaps there was a bit of unfinished business to be dealt with. I didn’t think I’d achieved what I was capable of and want to another go. I’d just turned fifty and it felt like if I didn’t do it now it would be too late. I jumped back in and very quickly everything spiralled out of control.
2019 was supposed to be the year everything changed. I’d marked it on my calendar as the time to press the reset button. 2018 was the culmination of a long and difficult journey from Male to female. I’d been in a strange state of limbo for too long, neither him nor her, but in October 2018 I had my man bits lopped off and I was finally her. Once I’d recovered the world was going to be mine.
My long term dream, my post transition goal, was to stick two fingers up to my career and head off around Europe on my bike. But Brexit happened. I got scared, I got cold feet and took the safe route. I took a permanent position at work and Europe didn’t happen, at least not on a grand scale. But this isn’t about my thwarted life plans, this is about the unexpected opportunity that blossomed in it’s place, the wonderful world of XC racing.
I’d been looking forward to racing as a lady for a long time, all my life if I’m honest. My gender identity and cycling go hand in hand. I first realised I was a bit messed up on the gender front looking at adverts for Muddy Fox. They featured a semi naked Jacquie Phelan with paw prints running up her back. I spent hours staring at those adverts, but I couldn’t figure out what it was that captivated me. I’d known I was a bit messed up on the gender front from the get go, but it was a fantasy, it couldn’t be talked about and would never be a reality, but starring at those images finally brought it home. I didn’t like Muddy Fox bikes, I didn’t fancy her, I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be a woman, even better, a woman on a bike.
That dream became a reality on January the 17th 2019, almost exactly 3 months after having the Chop. Looking back that’s shocking. It was only 12 weeks after having my privates rearranged and I was back on my bike!
I had been racing in limbo for 3 years, entering as a Her but categorised as a Him. Reassignment opened the door for me to race as female. Although, strictly speaking it is not a necessity. Under the current UCI guideline it’s all on hormone levels, which in my opinion are bizarrely high, but you can Google this for yourself and make up your own mind. Plus rules change, and since writing this the facts might be different. It’s a contentious issue, and I’ve turned myself inside out fretting about the correctness of trans-participation in sport. I’ve got to point where I’m so confused that I’ve given up worrying about it. I’ll compete until someone tells me I can’t.
My first task before I could turn a pedal in competition was to get the approval of cycling’s governing bodies. For me that was British Cycling (BC) and Cycling Time Trials (CTT). It was fairly straightforward getting the thumbs up from BC, although somewhat time consuming. It was just a matter sending them all the relevant paper work to make sure I ticked all the right boxes, that I was what I said I was and my hormone levels were right. Once BC were happy the CTT followed suit and it was all systems go for my first year racing as a woman.
Now I could race, I started looking for events. It came as a bit of a shock to discover the XC season kicked off so early in the year. The first round of the National Points Series was at Sherwood Pines on 24th of March, just over two months away and I didn’t even have a bike.
In a pre-operative pre-emptive strike I’d already done a conversion job on my Orbea Loki. I’d bought a new set of wheels, some flat bars and converted it from a 27.5+ trail bike into a 29er XC weapon, sort of. It was a bit on the heavy and I was hankering after something carbon and lightweight.
One night, sitting in bed when the crossword had proved to much, I started searching for deals on last years bikes. I found a Wilier 101x with a XX1 Eagle drive train, XT brakes, Fox forks and Mavic Crossmax Elite wheels, all at a very good price. The superstar cyclist in me was whispering in my ear, telling me I must have it. And all of a sudden it’s whoops, and I’ve clicked the buy button! That was the beginning of March. The bike was sorted with three weeks to go to the first race. I must have entered it by then.
I was eligible to ride, I had the bike, no club clothing, but my biggest issue was fitness. Was I race fit? I really didn’t think so. I’d been back on the bike six weeks and I got three weeks left to prepare. Looking back at my Strava feed, I wasn’t putting in a lot of hours on the bike. I was only managing two or three rides a week, but the week of my first event I racked up 223k. It was my biggest week on the bike since the op. I was riding every day so I must have been committed and off work. On the day of the race I must have been knackered! I do remember thinking I ‘d taken on far more than I could deal with, but in reality it didn’t matter, I’d got nothing to loose. And then there was the gender thing, but see the race report for that, First Race.
It was only a week later and I was at it again, Crank It Round 1 at Lee Quarry in Bacup. Two weeks after that it was back to HSBC National Points Series Round 3 at Hadliegh Farm in Essex. This was one of the high points of my year. I was loving racing and the excitement of riding on the Olympic course gave me a real boost. It was also where the fear began to rise it’s head.
Hadleigh Farm was by far the most difficult course of the year. There were several challenging technical areas, but there were two really got my pulse racing. The first was the double drop, then about half way around the circuit there was a very steep descent with a technical intro. My first impression of both these feature was ‘I can’t ride that!’ After a prolonged period of searching for courage I took them on and rode them. Helped in no small amount by watching the Juvenile girls do it. I thought if they can do it, I can do it. But this had the effect of instilling in me course fear. I was new to this and I didn’t know what to expect at each venue. In the run up to a race I’d start to get panicky about the severity of the course, it didn’t help with my pre-race prep. I had nothing to worry about though, none of the other courses came close to Hadliegh. And if I’m honest, most weren’t challenging enough.
Hadliegh was also my best result of the year, 2nd in a National Points Series event. I came out of it on high, I thought I was going to get stronger and stronger. The superstar me was running rampant. I thought I was going to take on the world and win, and I wanted to.
I was still riding high in May for Round 3 of HSBC National Points Series on Cannock Chase. I had a good ride, finishing 3rd. The following week it was Round 2 of the Midlands MTB Series at the same Venue. I was running at full gas for that event and stormed it from beginning to end, winning my category. I wished the NPS race had been a week later, I might have done better if it had been.
It was a miracle I did as well as I did. In the week in between the two events I had a bike fit, and as a result my saddle was lowered an enormous 30mm. I thought my position was pretty good, so to have my saddle dropped so much was embarrassing. The previous season I’d been tipped off by a club member that my saddle was too high, so I dropped it a bit. Then I saw a video of myself riding a TT, and it was obvious my seat was still too high, so I dropped it more. So to have it lowered a further 30mm was frightening! The up shot of this was the my bike felt far too small, and the dropper post I’d just spent £300 on was more or less redundant.
I wanted to improve, to get faster and I was getting hungry for wins, especially the National Championships. If I was going win, I needed to get serious, and getting serious meant spending a lot of money. I jumped in with both feet and shelled £1500 on power meters, one for my MTB and one for my road bike. But forking out a small fortune on power meters is a pointless if you don’t known how to use them, so I also went in search of a coach. The initial effects of this were pretty disastrous.
I had my routine and my methods, and they seemed to work for me. Monday was a rest day. Tuesday was short and hard, Wednesday was easy but long, Thursday I did whatever I felt like. Friday my manic mountain biking day when I’d ride as hard and as fast as I could for as long as I could. Saturday was moderate road miles, two hours or so. And Sunday was an easy but long road miles, 100 to 200K. With the engagement of a coach, all that went out the window. It felt that I wasn’t doing enough, and that training, doing structured workouts as apposed to just riding, wasn’t working. This belief started messing with my head. I knew I had to trust the process, but it felt like my fitness was slipping away. I was also missing my manic Friday afternoon rides, throwing myself down my favourite hills as fast as I could, but if it was the cost of victory, so be it. I knew when I went in to I’d left too late for this season, it was an investment in next year, but it didn’t stop me from getting despondent.
By mid season I was really beginning to suffer psychologically. I hit a low on the drive to the HSBC NPS Round 3 at Thickthorn Hall near Norwich. Everything seemed to come together in just the wrong way. On the interminably long journey there, I had an episode of down and ended weeping to myself as I drove. Personally things were far from perfect. Professionally I was having to go in directions I didn’t want to go. I had a bad case of course fear, would I be able to ride this circuit? And my bike life had become horrendously predictable. I knew what the result of the race would be, and I was still hours away from the venue.
It wasn’t a bad race. The track was flat and boring. All the technical stuff was crammed into one place, and I had nothing to fear about being able to ride what technical stuff there was. I performed okay, and finished exactly where I knew I would, 3rd place. I was in a bad place, and I knew I had to take something positive from the weekend. I knew I had to deal with The Fear, and I had to do something to combat the feeling of inevitability about race results.
A month later and I was still in a similar place. This time Midlands MTB Series Round 4 at Elkington woods, near Sheffield. This time my miasma was compounded by torrential rain, and what I have now come to regard as my Achilles heel, mud. I was feeling quite good going into the race, I thought the course would favour me, that was until I did the warm up lap. The course would have been good if it was dry, probably one of the best of the year. But it was wet and muddy, and in some places there was so little grip I thought it was dangerous. I was fearing an off and the idea of another broken collar bone didn’t appeal to me. I was on the verge of pulling out of the event. Come the start of the race, when the whistle blew I just sat there. Everybody was on the way out of start/finish field before I started riding. Once the race was under way things improved, but there were big sections that instead of attacking I was tiptoeing through. It added something else to the list of things to be afraid of, mud.
In the run up to The National Championships I hit the seasons lowest point. In my head everything was going wrong. I thought my new training regime was failing me, my list of pre-race issues was getting longer, and my despondency about always coming third was becoming insurmountable. The predictability of the outcome of the races was making doing them seemingly pointless.
Then I had the boost I needed. I did a personal best in a club 25, my best time since resuming racing in 2016, I did 1:04:52. And to make it even sweeter I’d forgotten my cycling shoes and rode in trainers. It was a massive shot in the arm and pulled me out of the doldrums. Only five days before The National Champs and the reset button had been pushed. For the first time in ages I began to believe I could win the title.
I went into the Nationals fired up and filled with optimism, and for half a lap I thought I could win it, but I ended up coming second. It was a hollow result as one of my main competitors, and perhaps the lady who would have won, crashed out on the second lap.
The season was over bar the final event of the Midlands MTB Series. By now I’d switched off and was freewheeling. I just wanted the ride and hopefully gain some more points. But going into the event I was fearing a mud fest. This was a the week of the Whaley Bridge dam disaster, we’d had nothing but rain for weeks and I was expecting a water logged course. I was actually expecting the event to be cancelled. But come the day of the race the sun was shining and the course was great, one of the best of the year. I looked like it had never rained in Bridge North and the trails were dry and dusty, what more could you ask for? I did a good ride, I can’t moan about my performance, I couldn’t have pushed any harder and finished 2nd. And to top it off I came away as the winner of the series, a victory I felt I’d earned. It was a good way to end the XC season.
That was my first XC season over and done with. I’d got a 2nd place in the National Championships, 3rd in the series, and I finished 2nd on the National points table. I really can’t complain.There was just the small matter of the Enduro I’d entered for fun, but lets draw a veil over that!
So what happens now, what are my intentions? Do I need to say I’ll be back racing XC next year? Yeah, I will be. Where I’m sitting now I want to build my base fitness and work on my core strength over winter, then start to train specifically for racing after Christmas. I should go into the 2020 season in far better shape than I was in 2018 or 2019. This year I haven’t got any major operations to recover from, unless I do something stupid, but I’ll come back to this.
Then there’s the issue of training, it’s hard work. I’m not talking about the time on the bike, or the core and strength workouts. It’s all the other stuff, the sacrifices you have to make, the time it takes out of your life, driving to and from venues and the demands it makes on your bank balance. It’s having to give up fun in favour of pain, and a cheaper brand of yoghurt.
And that brings me back to that Enduro I did so badly at, yes I want to do more. Which means I’ve got to work on the technical side of riding, which means the chances of doing something stupid are quite high. After all, what is it they say, “If you’re not crashing, you’re not stretching your limits.” Of course there is more to this than just wanting to race Enduros, being a technically better rider has got to be better for XC racing to. And then there’s The Fear. Facing my demons, pushing myself into uncomfortable situations is going to help me combat The Fear and develop my confidence, and hopefully banish that aspect of my pre-race apprehension. And let’s forget racing for a minute, I want to be a better rider. I want to be able to jump and do manuals, I want to be the superstar rider in my head, the one whispering to me, telling me to buy that Yeti! And lets face it, I’m running out of time. I’m fifty. I’m supping at the bar of the last chance saloon, if I don’t do it now it will be too late. So I’m going to grab the bike by the handlebars and ride!
Lulu-R's Cycling Times 