There’s one conversation that seems to dominate women’s cycling at the moment. Yes, the Women’s Tour aka Women’s Tour of Britain. Anyway, here it is from my perspective:

Great news! the World’s best women will at last be able to race in the most successful cycling country. This can only be good news and is a step in the right direction. How does it affect me? Well, we have a top race which is likely to attract lots of media attention. This attracts sponsors.  So, the world’s top teams are invited and the rest of the spaces will likely go to UK domestic teams. There is no guarantee as to how many spaces there will be, but what is guaranteed is that there are now a lot of teams, and their sponsors, wanting to get in. No, REALLY wanting to get in.

In order to be considered, each team is trying to select the best riders who will give them the best opportunity to get an invite. In turn, each rider is wanting to be one of those best riders. In short, everyone is upping there game.

So, the women’s elite racing is going to be faster, harder, stronger than ever before and I don’t want to be left behind. I’m really focussed and motivated on my winter training – something I didn’t feel quite so much last winter. I’ve now got a coach on board – something I had intended to do before the news of the Women’s Tour – but I feel that it’s even more important for me now. Mark has created a training plan and is identifying what training I need to do each day. This is somewhat of a relief for me as before, I wasn’t really sure what I needed to do, but I now feel confident in what I’m doing and can focus 100% on the training session without that nagging doubt in the back of my mind.

I am now doing everything I can to be ready for next year, but I see a problem…

If the elite level racing is going to be that much harder, what will happen to the lower levels of racing? I see that gap between local racing and elite racing growing, making the step between the two, extremely difficult. This is one of the reasons why I felt that we needed a local league for the Eastern region. We have since set up WERL (Women’s Eastern Racing League). More on this to follow.