A member of a strong Cycling Ulster team going into Rás Tailteann, Lindsay Watson already has six wins to his name in road races this year and would love a stage in Ireland's premier stage race for men. Last year he got a taste of stage race victory on the home scene when he won Kerry Group Rás Mumhan overall after going into yellow by claiming the opening stage. He knows Rás Tailteann is a step up but says he would love a victory.
Watson (Powerhouse Sport) also told stickybottle he believes the Rás will get progressively harder each season, including this week's edition being tougher than last year. That means there's no better time than this week to take a win, but he also goes in with his eyes wide open. He knows what to expect: brutality.
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"It's hard to know with the Rás and every year now going forward it's going to get harder as it starts to attract more foreign teams again. With that mixture of provincial teams, national team, trade teams… it's hard to get a domestic team that's really, really strong."
Watson said the Cycling Ulster team last year was "especially strong" - himself, Matt Teggart, John Buller, Darnell Moore and Gareth O'Neill. However, Teggart is not in the same type of form this year - after a recalibration when his UK Continental collapsed in recent weeks. Buller and O'Neill are riding the race for their UK elite team, PB Performance.
This year Watson is part of an UIster team that includes Conor Halvey, Jamie Meehan, Mitchell McLaughlin and Nathan Mullan. He believed that was still a very strong selection and, perhaps, it may benefit them not to be looked upon by everyone else as one of the strongest teams in the race, the way last year's line-up was, with all the pressure that comes with that.
"For me, I've always said I'd love a stage win," he said. "So, yeah, that's something I'll go after. I think the overall, as nice as it would be, it will be a tricky one, it really will."
Watson opened his account with a win in the John Haldane Memorial on the second weekend of the season, followed by the PJ Logan Road Race two weeks later. There followed victory in the Killinchy GP on the first weekend in April and then the Mid Ulster GP and Lakeland GP on consecutive days on the penultimate weekend in April, followed by the Sean Lynch Memorial the weekend before last.
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While he is a seasoned competitor, and a proven winner in both road races and TTs even before this season, his run of form so far in 2023 has been impressive. He has been aggressive and been able to win via sprints from breakaways or with very long solo efforts.
Strangely, he says his form is perhaps a product of being forced to train indoors for months over the winter, up to the start of the season and even in recent weeks.
"I got hit by a car last year and I did a lot of damage to my elbow," he said. "So, of the back of that, a lot of my training was indoors. It was really only late January… that was my first time getting back out onto the road again. I'm still, I suppose, suffering from it. After a big weekend of riding on the road, I'm sore. So I'm still doing a lot of my training indoors through the week."
With so much of his training being done on the home trainer, he believed the quality of those efforts - the precise way he could measure the efforts and never wasting any time - has likely resulted in his good form in recent months.
"I'm working nearly 10 hours a day," said Watson, who works as an engineer when he's not training, racing or tinkering around with his bikes. "So it's 5 o'clock starts," he explains of rising very early to hit the home trainer.
"I may do 1½ hours in the morning indoors, easy. And then my sessions during week are usually done with a bit of intensity - tempo, sweetspot type intervals… intensity maybe two or three times a week.
"The mornings would be low intensity, easy. But it all adds up; that extra hour or so in the morning really helps. It's a case of up every morning an 5 to do at least an hour. I'm that busy with work it's the only way I can squeeze in volume through the week - accumulate that time in the morning on top of 1½-2 hours in the evenings."
Whether that will be enough, and a working man can still win a stage on the Rás, will soon become clear as the race kicks off tomorrow for five stages of action.
