Recently, I raced the National MTB Championships in Plymouth. The course had a reputation of being incredibly technical and hard, however when we got there and walked the course, we found it to be technically easy with only 1 rock garden. The course was fast with not much recovery and more climbing than it looked making it very demanding.

In course practice I made a silly mistake and crashed hard on a corner in the woods. I was really annoyed with myself as I thought I had ruined my race. My knee was really sore and had a large graze so I wasn't able to put much power through it on my warmup. I had no idea how the race would go.

On the start line I decided I would just give it everything I had, I started and sat in 8^th place up the climb. I then moved up the places wherever I could on the first half of the lap, and I was sitting in 5^th place comfortably. I decided the pace was too slow for me and I attacked up the climb after half a lap to sit in 4^th place, by this time I had forgotten about my crash in practice and my knee stopped hurting. I spent the rest of the race in 4^th place with a 40s gap to the rider behind me. As the course was mentally demanding due to the small amounts of rest, I made 3 mistakes in the space of 10 minutes on lap 3 of 4. This caused the gap to decrease so I knew I had to dig deep on the last lap to keep my 4^th place in the race.

Fortunately, I finished in 4^th very happy with the way I rode and felt. I was just off the podium, but I was really happy to have made it round after the hard crash in practice.