After the fine weather of the previous week, it was a return to more typical Betteshanger conditions for the final evening time trial of the 2020 season. It was grey, cool and rather windy for the 37 riders who signed on.
As a result of the poorer conditions, most riders’ times were slower than those of last week. I made a late debut for 2020, and I was over-optomistic about my fitness and abilities. Too few miles and too many kilograms didn’t help my cause!
This week we had 11 juniors take part, and heading the times was George Pittock with a course PB of 22.28. This was George’s first event after three weeks off due to a crash. Third place went to our fastest girl, Ferne Peirce, with a time of 29.15.
As expected, Nic Fennell took top spot in the senior section. Nic’s time was 20.07. Susan Wallbrook recorded a time of 26.03 for fastest woman rider.
Times can be found in the PDF files below.
A big thank you to Ian Ferrell of VC Deal, who swept the track the previous day and cleared a lot of dirt and dust from the surface.
Thanks as always to this week’s helpers, who were Sue Shields, Terry Fearn, Simon Charles, Mike Kirkness, Simon Henderson and Andy McCall.
In summary, I think that the 6 events that we held in these strange times were a great success. It was good to see so many old familiar faces, and some new ones too. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but with help and suggestions from the club committee and members, we came up with a plan on how we could hold events within the Covid-19 guidelines. The way we ran the events seemed to work well, and there has been a lot of positive feedback from riders and their families. Of course, the facility at Betteshanger has been an ideal venue to run events, with plenty of open space to ensure social distancing. This year has been a learning experience on how to run events in the wake of a pandemic. I’m sure this will help us in 2021, should we still be restricted in how we run our activities.
Report by Dave Mastin.