Bespoke Blog

Red Hook Crit London, July 11th.

The Red Hook Criterium is the world's premier track bike crit featuring professional road racers, track specialists, bike messengers and urban cyclists competing over multiple laps around a fast technical circuit. Fixed gear track bicycles are mandatory, requiring riders to possess street-tuned handling skills and high levels of fitness.

The Red Hook Criterium comes to London's Greenwich Peninsula on Saturday, July 11th. Free for spectators and accessible via the Jubilee Line. Races begin at 17:30. You can read more about the event here .

Our friend Juliet Elliott will be riding the event. Sponsored by Charge and an ambassador for Assos, Juliet is no stranger to riding all kinds of bikes on all kinds of terrain. She recently had a bike fit with us and was able to sue this data to improve her new track set up:

"Charge Bikes just sent me a special track bike for racing the Red Hook Crit next month so I wasted no time in putting it together and taking it to the Velopark for a spin. I was able to use the measurements Chris at Bespoke Cycling sent me after my bike fit to make sure it was set up properly and ended up buying a longer stem and narrower bars to replicate the position he'd sorted out for me on my road bike. Before the fit, I was quite hunched and had my saddle too high so it's taken a while to get used to being more stretched out, but now I really like it and I can drive more power through the cranks."

Juliet's involvement was all a bit last minute but she's been doing some last minute training and writing about the experience on her blog .

"Training has been going really well, though of course a month is not enough time to train properly for an event like this! It's funny, because before I'd always been anti training as I thought that it took the fun away from riding your bike, but as the month has progressed I've got more and more into it. I wonder if that's because I know its only for a month or whether I'll continue with it…I honestly reckon I won't want to stop, but who knows! I've been working with James from High Rise Coaching and focusing on high intensity interval training with some short, sharp shocks to the system and plenty of rest days to allow my muscles to recover and hopefully build."

We wish Juliet luck on Saturday. It'll be a great race! Check the RHC Twitter feed for more details of other events surrounding the race.