Return to my roots... 66 degres sud TT 🏆

Well... this was a bit of a baptism of fire to be honest!!

Given that TTs is how I got into cycling in the first place, I realised on the drive to Perpignan that it's been almost 2 years since I raced my TT bike. I only entered this event on the train back from Copenhagen after my half marathon, deciding that TT training had gone okay and I fancied a fun, low pressure race to reintroduce myself to the hurt.

I arrived in the region at 15.00 on Wednesday and headed out on the bike to check out the route. The course had a few km of flat at the start and end but otherwise the remaining 19km was effectively climb-descent-climb-descent.

Given the nature of the descents (the first being narrow and twisty, and the second being exposed and windy) I opted to run my zephyr front wheel rather than the deeper, 100mm Titan.

For some reason, despite working perfectly in warm up (and cool down), I started my race effort and looked at my Garmin to discover no power numbers 🙄. I have zero clue why, though with the course not being one for “average power” it allowed my to just ride on feel - pushing the climbs and recovering on the descents.

A lot of people opted for road bikes and honestly I don’t think it was much of a disadvantage, especially with how windy the last descent ended up being.

I’m really happy I chose this as my first TT back because it was a really fun course, very pretty and a low pressure event. I’ve never done a Gran Fondo race before as I’ve always had UCI points but the atmosphere was super friendly and made the whole day very enjoyable.

And, as a bonus, not only did I win my age category but I won the women’s event overall 🥳 so now I just need to decide whether to add the Wolrd Championships in Japan to my race calendar for the year 🙈