Road Riding & Racing Development Sessions

Spring has sprung so it’s time to dust off your road bike and skinny tyres.

Scottish Cycling have provided funding to Hervelo to put on four Women’s Road Riding & Racing Development sessions throughout Spring and Summer.

The aim of these sessions is to get you “race ready” with the skills and confidence needed to ride safely around corners and in a bunch. The first two sessions will be ideal for anyone wanting to do more group riding and the latter sessions will have more of a race specific focus.

Your wonderful coach will be the newly qualified Jodie.

The sessions will all be 2 hours long at the fantastic, West Lothian Cycle Circuit in Linlithgow, 5 minutes along the canal cycle path from the train station. 

They will be run as a progression and we will focus on different skills at each session.

Hervelo are part of the West Lothian Cycle Circuit Association, organising a round of the Thank Crit It’s Friday race series. These are fun and friendly events that are suitable for all. These are all held on the same circuit as our sessions, making them a great aim for those attending the sessions. If you want to know more about crit racing, check out our blog post.

You do not need to have any racing experience to join these sessions, but you should be confidently able to ride a road bike. Only drop bar bikes are suitable for these sessions.

We’d encourage you to sign up for the full block. However, we understand that life can sometimes get in the way of bike riding so don’t worry if you can only attend some of the sessions!

Importantly, these sessions are completely free!

Session 1: Cornering

Saturday 25th April 10am

This session will focus how to safely and successfully ride the tight corners of the Linlithgow track. We’ll start with each doing a time trial around the track, before looking in depth at cornering techniques. We’ll finish the session with another time trial to see if the improvements we’ve made to our techniques allow us to get round the track faster!

Session 2: Bunch/Group Riding

Saturday 16th May 10am

This session will focus on riding in a group. We’ll start in pairs and go through what we should be doing to ride safely in groups. We’ll gradually increase the size of the groups and practice riding in different locations in the group before finishing with a chain gang so we can all get comfortable moving around in the group.

Session 3: Sprinting

Sunday 5th July 10:30am

Sprinting is fun and I’m super hyped for this session. We’ll look at different sprinting techniques and again practice in pairs before moving to bigger groups. We’ll finish with a big group points race where we sprint each lap.

Session 4: Teamwork and Race Tactics

Sunday 26th July 10:30am

Road racing gets a lot more fun when you work towards a specific aim, sometimes thats to hold onto the back of the bunch, sometimes its to keep the bunch together to finish as a sprint and sometimes its to form a breakaway. We’ll look at how we can work towards these goals in races. We’ll look at how as individuals we can put these tactics into play and then form teams to see how we can be more effective when we work together.