Beginners Guide To Road Racing

• Make sure your bike and kit look good. Remember, you're only as good as your last performance, but style is forever!
   
• Get the miles in
   
• Learn to love intervals
   
• Learn how to hold a wheel, stick you elbows out and hold your place.
   
• Learn how to suffer, lots.
   
• Learn that age and treachery will always beat youth and fitness.
   
• Learn that road racing is about responding to changes in pace, rather than outright speed or power.
   
• Do lots of intervals at your absolute max effort; it still won't match what you experience in races.
   
• Ride with others, lots and lots.
   
• Practice riding skills; high speed cornering, flicking your bike about, riding in the wet, etc.
   
• You will crash and it will hurt. If you want an easy sport, go and play football.
   
• Just do it, accept that it is likely that you will be beaten like a rented donkey the first few times you race.
   
• Forget any magic bullets; road racing is about high speed and skill and intelligence; work on these rather than looking at heart rates or power output or fancy stuff.
   
• Learn to eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty.
   
• The head will always pack before the body. Learn to enjoy the pain!
   
• Ignore the 1^st Cats having a conversation whilst you're blowing out your A$£%
   
• If someone swears at you, swear back.
   
• Don't throw your water bottles away, you're not in the Tour De France! (If you are in the Tour De France, why are you reading this?)
   
• If you go out the back, make it look like you planned it.
   
• Don't sprint for 40^th place, it's a bit sad.
   
• If you're scared of sprinting, don't be at the front of the bunch coming into the final bend, get out of the way!
   
• When the great day comes and you're on your own coming to the finish and there's only the chief commissaire and two ladies that do the tea, dont put your arms up... you'll look like a berk
   
• If you have to put your arms up, don't fall off! You'll never live it down.
   
• Don't try to punch anyone while wearing cycling shoes, you'll look like a mincing fairy. Take them off first!