Rest day

Woke up at 5:30 to go to Bristol track but I was really aching so I decided to have a rest day to recover from racing.

I have been thinking over my performance yesterday and I need to focus on pumping and manualing as much as possible to get faster around the rest of the track. I also need to learn to corner properly turning the bike not me leaning in order to corner faster. At the moment I am cornering like I did back in the day with my knee out and me leaning my weight outside the bike. The best technique to keep grip is to keep your weight over the bike and move the bike under you. I will start practicing this tomorrow along with full laps at Bath.

I am also thinking that I need to start riding pump tracks too as all the kids that ride pump tracks are fast and can manual and jump really smoothly. The pump tracks will have to wait a bit as it is half the term and they will be really busy. Pump tracks are good as they have a lot of jumps close together so you practice the skills more in a shorter amount of time than on the track.

Although yesterday's racing didn't go so well a positive other than my first straight was that my fitness has improved a lot since last season. The track yesterday was really long and I was tired when I finished but I didn't get jelly legs and arms like I used to which is a positive.

I think my main problem yesterday was that I have trained for the last three months to just focus on the first straights and then just cruise around the rest of the track which has meant that I only held my focus for the first straight which meant that I wasn't riding the rest of the track at full speed or concentrating on line or how to take each jump I was just bumbling about which caused me to get overtaken all the time.

For the next race we are going to stay down in Cornwall for the weekend so I can practice on the Saturday and Sunday so hopefully I will have time to learn the rest of the track. I also want to go down for a practice session to get used to the track before the race weekend. This time I will concentrate on the whole track not just getting quick on the first straight.