Races that are what I would consider close to home (~1hours travelling) are few and far between in XC racing, so when I realised that Round 5 of the Gorrick Spring series was at Swinley forest I quickly added it to my schedule. Plus Swinley is a great place to ride and I don't need much of an excuse to go and ride there especially on a sunny day.
 
The Gorrick events are always well organised and although they do not carry any National ranking points the fields are always a similar size and quality to the Southern XC series. Therefore this was a good race to help fine tune my riding and build on my recent improvements.

The course was a mix of fast fireroads and tight twisty single track, all spread across the undulations of Swinley Forest. If nothing else it was a fun lap to ride.
 
Going into this race my legs didn't feel good at all (thanks to a 50km 3-up team time trial Saturday) so my main intention was to not worry about placing and just try and work on riding smoothly and riding technically strongly. Aside from lap 2, where I was anything but smooth and my body didn't seem to like the idea of pushing hard, I had a fairly consistent race and as is typical for me and my endurance shows through I moved up a couple of places on the last lap.

I finished 5th in the end, which is respectable on tired legs and most importantly I have got a lot of things I know I need to work on before the more important upcoming races.

Best Regards,

Mark
bucksmtb.co.uk

Photo courtesy Joolze Dymond - http://joolzedymond.com/
More photos available at http://joolzedymond.com/