Wartburg Illovo Classic - Alan Hatherly

A race for training and with plenty of hopes that the weather would be dry on the day, that thankfully came through. I had entered for the 45km due to that being the race for my category, which was not a bad thing since I had done this race the previous year so I had a rough idea of what the course was like.

An early start to the day with my race beginning at 8am, I was really excited for the race to start so I could ride some of the awesome single track that Wartburg had to offer. We were off and I started fairly far back, but with a slow start I made my way to the front quite quickly and after sitting with a few riders for about 1km I rode away and went solo from there out. The first 15km of the course were really fun being fairly flat and with some really fun flowing dry single track, with had no traffic yet. At about 18km the real tough part of the course began, being in the bottom of a valley, we had to climb out and they definitely chose a hard way to get out. I started to hit the 62km A batch traffic now, so I was constantly overtaking. Thankfully by the top of about an 8km climb I had gotten past most of the riders, and what was really tough was the hill called "Zig Zag". It was over 16% at places and it felt like it would never end, passing people here was easy because most of them were walking! Going over the top of this dragged out climb was really awesome and made the climb way worth it. It was steeper single track with a few powdery sections where I could really have fun on my Pinarello. After coming out this single track and taking a High5 gel quickly, it gave me that extra boost just to get me to the finish line still feeling good. In the last 8km's of the race there were up to triple single tracks which was really awesome being traffic free and also fun for people to race each other trough the twisty single track's. Soon I was near the rail way line at the finish and it was a short ride home to my first 45km overall win of the season! I managed to improve my race time from the previous year by 10minutes beating the track record.

It was such an awesome, well organised race and I'll definitely be there again next year!