2010 Cyprus Sunshine Cup Round 2 Stage 2 - Macheras Mountains

Start of the women's race followed by masters and juniors

Today was the 2nd stage of round 2 of the Cyprus Sunshine Cup. The race was a point to point race on the same course as last year.

My bike run perfectly after Ryan put on the new cassette and chain rings half an hour before the race. And the weather was nice and warm again, too! The start went OK and I tried to catch the group of girls just ahead of me, but just couldn't get myself to push that little bit harder to close the gap. So I was riding around most of the course by myself. And I really started enjoying myself once I hit the singletrack climb. I almost caught up with some of the girls in front, but again just couldn't go harder. I had a lot of fun on the super long single track descent, going so much faster than last year. I absolutely loved it!

Sue Clarke (GBR) entering the long single-track descent

I took it relatively easy to the finish too, and arrived with a huge smile on my face - I definitely didn't go hard enough, but at least it was a lot of fun!

Thanks to Marios and Polys for getting the chain rings and cassette to us just in time, Thomas for the tools to put them on, and Harry and Friedl for the feedzone support.

I came in 7th, improving on my General Classification by 3 places. Results up here.

Mtb-live.com has again captured some post race reactions.

2010 Cyprus Sunshine Cup Round 1 - Voroklini

Woman's podium :)

Wow, that was HARD! The first race of the season is always hard, but this one seemed so much harder again than any first race in any season. It didn't help that the race organizers had added another lap to this course, so that my race was 2h 4min long!

There were 20 girls in the women's Elite race, with a high profile field, including the vice U-23 world champ and several national champs, most of them using these races as early season race prep. Each of the 5 laps had 240m of climb and boy, the climbs were tough. There were some power sapping steppy climbs, some technical singletrack climbs and some draggy fireroad climbs, with some granny gear kicker climbs strewn in for good measure. Hell, it felt like you were climbing almost all of the time! But maybe that also had to do that whatever height you gained was lost in no time on the super steep technical descents, featuring amongst them the famous dry riverbed descent that has seen many a man walking.

Women's start

Anyhow, back to the race and the feeling of lactate acid filling up your legs and turning them to leady jelly. I didn't have the greatest of starts but did my best to stick with the lead group of about 6 girls. While the front few girls pulled away from the first lap, Alexandra Engen (SWE), Sue Clarke (GBR) and I were ding-donging for about a lap before I managed to slowly pull away from them both. I was able to increase my gap and even when my legs started cramping up in the last lap I was able to stay away to cross the line in 4th place - I am so so happy to have had such a good start into the new season.

Having fun on the techy descents

One thing that was very different this year was that I felt really comfortable on the technical descents. It felt like something has clicked in my head - and I rode all of them well controlled and relaxed, possibly even making up time on them. I cannot explain what happened, since a lot of my recent training has not been very technical, but I really enjoyed them. So far so good :)


Thanks again to Frederick for doing the bottles - this year with ZipVit Energy drink - it seemed to work well in the race :)

Results on cyclingnews.com