Iona Mitchell journal #01: from Banbury bruises to Palace panic
Say hello to Iona Mitchell - our newest voice at The British Continental. Her first diary is a punchy, laugh-out-loud dive into the true grit of UK road racing: crashes on Banbury’s berg, skinsuit changes in office loos, and shifter-snapping chaos at Palace. Raw, witty, 100 % real.
There’s a particular kind of grit that comes from learning to race on Britain’s windswept seafronts and suburban circuit parks, and Iona Mitchell has it by the bucket-load. A few short seasons ago she was, by her own cheerful admission, a complete ‘fred’; today she’s a bona-fide cat 2 racer for London Academy, squeezing training rides between lie-ins and beach-dinners at her home in Hastings on the Sussex coast.
Now, in a brand-new diary for The British Continental, Iona will be opening the door to that messy, brilliant world just below the glossy pro tier: half-zipped skinsuits in office loos, railway-station shoulder barges, and the eternal tug-of-war between ambition and real-life logistics. Expect equal parts self-deprecation and sharp observation, the kind of wry honesty that will have anyone who’s ever pinned on a number nodding in recognition.
Her first dispatch whisks us from Banbury’s leg-breaking climb and an honourable elbows-out defence on the world’s busiest train, through a Monday comedown of Lidl and laundry, to the harum-scarum mayhem of Tuesday night at Crystal Palace.
Featured image: Owen Vidler
Sunday
It is Sunday afternoon at Oxford railway station and a lady is trying to push in front of me onto the world’s busiest train. She is not doing so successfully because both my bike and a large tent (no, not mine, and not pitched) are in her way. Elbows out, I honourably defend my place in the queue. As the lady glowers at me across the packed train corridor, over shoulders and under raised arms, I lament that the assertiveness I can summon on train platforms never seems to show during real bike races. If she understands me, she isn’t amused.
Life does not get better than a long hot train journey home after a very mid-pack result at a bike race. You have all the time in the world to replay all the bad decisions, while awkwardly wriggling for comfort between a festival-goers sweaty armpit and their bongos. Trying not to breathe, you can cast your mind back to every dodgy corner, lost wheel, the decade it took to re-clip after a crash. I do my best not to think about the pre-race incident where I got a huge black chain mark on my new white sock. I shudder. That’s where the bad luck started.
Everything happens too fast to understand. Riders go down to my left, handlebars briefly tangle, and I find myself across the road in the grass
The Banbury Star RR is mainly about the hill. A solid 9.6% 1km climb which can split the bunch even on the first lap. In the approach, a zingy nervousness rises in the group. Girls start taking risky trips up the right hand side of the road, riders appear and disappear as the fight for position gets underway. Then, at a T junction turning onto the climb, disaster.
Everything happens too fast to understand. Riders go down to my left, handlebars briefly tangle, and I find myself across the road in the grass.
The race disappears up the hill while I watch on, taking an age to re-clip, ineffectually bashing my feet around like a total amateur. Teammate Grace Sergeant hurtles by at a million miles an hour. Tipped for the win, I can feel her panic at getting caught out. I catch her at a tempered pace further up the hill and the depressing business of chasing on begins. That was our race over.
At the finish line, our sour mood is lifted. Lily- another team-mate, super keen and always upbeat, has an even bigger smile than usual on her face. It transpires that she’s taken second, in a heroic many-lap chase. It’s a bit emotional, for someone so genuine the prize couldn’t be more well deserved. Everyone is happy, the sun is shining, things are good again.
Hours later, the third and final train of the day abruptly announces that it will be terminating in Bexhill, and that there will be a rail replacement bus service to Hastings. The rail replacement bus overtakes us on the main stretch of road and we get a free draft most of the way home. Life could be worse.
Image: Rupert Hartley
Monday
Work, Lidl, washing, bed. No bike riding.
Tuesday
It is Tuesday, and we all know what that means.
At 3:45 pm I tap my fingers on my desk, spin whimsically on my swivel chair and bat my eyelashes at my boss.
‘Harriet?’
‘My dear?’
‘Do you think I could possibly dash off a bit early today? I want to get up to town.’
Cue a hurried few minutes of wriggling into my skinsuit in the loos (not hygienic), then running in and out of the office multiple times to grab my forgotten helmet, glasses and phone, and to fill up my bottle. Clopping across the car park to the building where my bike is locked, it dawns on me that I don’t have the key. Cue another frantic few minutes hunting down the site team, calling a colleague for a door code and, finally, retrieving the trusty steed.
I am off – but not in time; all that faff means I’m on the slightly later train, so it’ll be a sprint across town to make sign-on. That’s fine, I think. I always cut it fine anyway.
It was not fine.
It is 6-something pm and the rush-hour Cat 4 crit is in full swing
At London Bridge I navigate to the exit with all the grace of a pinball. It is 6-something pm and the rush-hour Cat 4 crit is in full swing. I chop a lady in a billowing summer dress; a man with neither helmet nor hair dive-bombs me. A taxi driver shouts abuse at a confused tourist. It is half an hour before sign-on closes.
Then, disaster strikes. Churning up Denmark Hill – probably trying to race an e-bike – I bash my shifter in. Don’t ask how (said the customer to the mechanic) – I just tapped it and bam: stuck in the little ring, the left shifter pointing inwards like a broken paw. I stop roadside, but my expertise ends with a few swear words and a prod. This has been coming for a while now; I’m a neglectful owner.
The clock is ticking; there’s no time to fix it – all I can do is spin. Legs flailing through Dulwich and up College Road, I don’t stop to check the time. I have no plan for when I get there; there is no way I can race like this.
Crossing over to the park, my team-mate EJ, warming up, spots me in the distance and gives a tentative wave. I’m met by more confused looks when I arrive, pausing on the wrong side of the grass to let the juniors’ race pass; my team-mates shout, ‘There she is!’ and ‘Are you racing?’
Image: Rupert Hartley
All I can do is gesture to my mangled shifter and hold back tears.
Across the path, I try to explain what’s happened to the group.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ says Sarah, my ever-fearless team manager. ‘Go and beg them to let you sign on and we’ll deal with the bike.’
I suck the last of the tears back up my ducts and prepare my sweetest damsel-in-distress face. The volunteers at the sign-on desk see me a mile off and ready their finest ‘You’re late’ faces. Success: I return with a set of numbers.
Sarah and the girls have cajoled an army of mechanics in shining armour to bodge my bike back into working order. All I can do is thank everyone over and over while multiple hands make fast work of the number-pinning. Feeling like a bit of a helpless moron, I’m handed back my bike and patted on the numbers just as the whistle blows for the start line. It’s probably been less than five minutes since I arrived.
I love Palace: it’s pure havoc. Full gas from the start, battling for the first hairpin, sprinting out to get a good position for each subsequent corner
No time to think – we go. I love Palace: it’s pure havoc. Full gas from the start, battling for the first hairpin, sprinting out to get a good position for each subsequent corner; someone always attacks on the short hill, then round again, with groups from the men’s races charging through and causing yet more chaos and splits. Teammates who’d been working together on the first lap scatter to the four winds – and then the trying to figure out what lap you’re on, whether the bell is for your group or the men’s behind.
Twenty minutes in, I realise I’m completely starving, having forgotten my pre-race gel and not having had time to buy a snack at the station. I complete the last laps running on empty.
Reunited with the team at the end, the frantic start is forgotten and we hug and laugh. Shattered, all I can think about is the Greggs steak bake I’m going to eat on the train home.
At around 10:30 pm I wipe the crumbs from my race suit and gaze at the black countryside ripping past the train window. A bit dejected, I try not to think about what I’m going to say to my boss the next day when she asks how my evening went.
In bed, just as my heart rate finally returns to normal and I feel myself slipping under, I remember to ask, ‘Darling, can you wash my race suit for tomorrow?’
There’s a particular kind of grit that comes from learning to race on Britain’s windswept seafronts and suburban circuit parks, and Iona Mitchell has it by the bucket-load. A few short seasons ago she was, by her own cheerful admission, a complete ‘fred’; today she’s a bona-fide cat 2 racer for London Academy, squeezing training rides between lie-ins and beach-dinners at her home in Hastings on the Sussex coast.
Now, in a brand-new diary for The British Continental, Iona will be opening the door to that messy, brilliant world just below the glossy pro tier: half-zipped skinsuits in office loos, railway-station shoulder barges, and the eternal tug-of-war between ambition and real-life logistics. Expect equal parts self-deprecation and sharp observation, the kind of wry honesty that will have anyone who’s ever pinned on a number nodding in recognition.
Her first dispatch whisks us from Banbury’s leg-breaking climb and an honourable elbows-out defence on the world’s busiest train, through a Monday comedown of Lidl and laundry, to the harum-scarum mayhem of Tuesday night at Crystal Palace.
Featured image: Owen Vidler
Sunday
It is Sunday afternoon at Oxford railway station and a lady is trying to push in front of me onto the world’s busiest train. She is not doing so successfully because both my bike and a large tent (no, not mine, and not pitched) are in her way. Elbows out, I honourably defend my place in the queue. As the lady glowers at me across the packed train corridor, over shoulders and under raised arms, I lament that the assertiveness I can summon on train platforms never seems to show during real bike races. If she understands me, she isn’t amused.
Life does not get better than a long hot train journey home after a very mid-pack result at a bike race. You have all the time in the world to replay all the bad decisions, while awkwardly wriggling for comfort between a festival-goers sweaty armpit and their bongos. Trying not to breathe, you can cast your mind back to every dodgy corner, lost wheel, the decade it took to re-clip after a crash. I do my best not to think about the pre-race incident where I got a huge black chain mark on my new white sock. I shudder. That’s where the bad luck started.
The Banbury Star RR is mainly about the hill. A solid 9.6% 1km climb which can split the bunch even on the first lap. In the approach, a zingy nervousness rises in the group. Girls start taking risky trips up the right hand side of the road, riders appear and disappear as the fight for position gets underway. Then, at a T junction turning onto the climb, disaster.
Everything happens too fast to understand. Riders go down to my left, handlebars briefly tangle, and I find myself across the road in the grass.
The race disappears up the hill while I watch on, taking an age to re-clip, ineffectually bashing my feet around like a total amateur. Teammate Grace Sergeant hurtles by at a million miles an hour. Tipped for the win, I can feel her panic at getting caught out. I catch her at a tempered pace further up the hill and the depressing business of chasing on begins. That was our race over.
At the finish line, our sour mood is lifted. Lily- another team-mate, super keen and always upbeat, has an even bigger smile than usual on her face. It transpires that she’s taken second, in a heroic many-lap chase. It’s a bit emotional, for someone so genuine the prize couldn’t be more well deserved. Everyone is happy, the sun is shining, things are good again.
Hours later, the third and final train of the day abruptly announces that it will be terminating in Bexhill, and that there will be a rail replacement bus service to Hastings. The rail replacement bus overtakes us on the main stretch of road and we get a free draft most of the way home. Life could be worse.
Monday
Work, Lidl, washing, bed. No bike riding.
Tuesday
It is Tuesday, and we all know what that means.
At 3:45 pm I tap my fingers on my desk, spin whimsically on my swivel chair and bat my eyelashes at my boss.
‘Harriet?’
‘My dear?’
‘Do you think I could possibly dash off a bit early today? I want to get up to town.’
Cue a hurried few minutes of wriggling into my skinsuit in the loos (not hygienic), then running in and out of the office multiple times to grab my forgotten helmet, glasses and phone, and to fill up my bottle. Clopping across the car park to the building where my bike is locked, it dawns on me that I don’t have the key. Cue another frantic few minutes hunting down the site team, calling a colleague for a door code and, finally, retrieving the trusty steed.
I am off – but not in time; all that faff means I’m on the slightly later train, so it’ll be a sprint across town to make sign-on. That’s fine, I think. I always cut it fine anyway.
It was not fine.
At London Bridge I navigate to the exit with all the grace of a pinball. It is 6-something pm and the rush-hour Cat 4 crit is in full swing. I chop a lady in a billowing summer dress; a man with neither helmet nor hair dive-bombs me. A taxi driver shouts abuse at a confused tourist. It is half an hour before sign-on closes.
Then, disaster strikes. Churning up Denmark Hill – probably trying to race an e-bike – I bash my shifter in. Don’t ask how (said the customer to the mechanic) – I just tapped it and bam: stuck in the little ring, the left shifter pointing inwards like a broken paw. I stop roadside, but my expertise ends with a few swear words and a prod. This has been coming for a while now; I’m a neglectful owner.
The clock is ticking; there’s no time to fix it – all I can do is spin. Legs flailing through Dulwich and up College Road, I don’t stop to check the time. I have no plan for when I get there; there is no way I can race like this.
Crossing over to the park, my team-mate EJ, warming up, spots me in the distance and gives a tentative wave. I’m met by more confused looks when I arrive, pausing on the wrong side of the grass to let the juniors’ race pass; my team-mates shout, ‘There she is!’ and ‘Are you racing?’
All I can do is gesture to my mangled shifter and hold back tears.
Across the path, I try to explain what’s happened to the group.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ says Sarah, my ever-fearless team manager. ‘Go and beg them to let you sign on and we’ll deal with the bike.’
I suck the last of the tears back up my ducts and prepare my sweetest damsel-in-distress face. The volunteers at the sign-on desk see me a mile off and ready their finest ‘You’re late’ faces. Success: I return with a set of numbers.
Sarah and the girls have cajoled an army of mechanics in shining armour to bodge my bike back into working order. All I can do is thank everyone over and over while multiple hands make fast work of the number-pinning. Feeling like a bit of a helpless moron, I’m handed back my bike and patted on the numbers just as the whistle blows for the start line. It’s probably been less than five minutes since I arrived.
No time to think – we go. I love Palace: it’s pure havoc. Full gas from the start, battling for the first hairpin, sprinting out to get a good position for each subsequent corner; someone always attacks on the short hill, then round again, with groups from the men’s races charging through and causing yet more chaos and splits. Teammates who’d been working together on the first lap scatter to the four winds – and then the trying to figure out what lap you’re on, whether the bell is for your group or the men’s behind.
Twenty minutes in, I realise I’m completely starving, having forgotten my pre-race gel and not having had time to buy a snack at the station. I complete the last laps running on empty.
Reunited with the team at the end, the frantic start is forgotten and we hug and laugh. Shattered, all I can think about is the Greggs steak bake I’m going to eat on the train home.
At around 10:30 pm I wipe the crumbs from my race suit and gaze at the black countryside ripping past the train window. A bit dejected, I try not to think about what I’m going to say to my boss the next day when she asks how my evening went.
In bed, just as my heart rate finally returns to normal and I feel myself slipping under, I remember to ask, ‘Darling, can you wash my race suit for tomorrow?’
‘Mmhmm.’
‘And my lucky sports bra.’
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