When the World Championship road races roll into Glasgow in August, no one is going to feel more at home than Anna Shackley.
Shackley, the only Scottish rider in the Women’s WorldTour, comes from Milngavie, eight miles north of the finish in George Square in the heart of Glasgow.
“It’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ride a World Championship on my home roads,” Shackley told Cyclingnews.
“It’s funny imagining the whole peloton, all these different people coming to my home city. I’m proud to be from Glasgow, so I’m quite excited for it.”
The women’s route misses the SD Worx rider’s front door by just a couple of kilometres as it winds its way south from Loch Lomond. To her, this isn’t just a World Championship course to be conquered, and these are roads which hold memories.
“I think I could do the race with my eyes shut, I’ve been cycling on those roads for years,” she said.
“The climb that they go up in both the men’s and the women’s race, anyone who lives around the Glasgow area always goes up that climb. It’s called the Crow Road. Before I went to France and places like that on holidays with my parents, that was the biggest climb I’d ever gone up. It’s around 15-20 minutes. When you look at it, you go: ‘Oh, that’s a huge mountain’ – especially when you’re 10 years old.”
“When I was younger with my brother and my dad, I would never stop up the climb because my dad would just leave me,” she recalled. “I was always racing my brother as well, so it was never an option just to stop. I had to get to the top.”
However, a couple of months ago, Shackley’s dream of racing up the Crow Road and through Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park with a British jersey on her back was in jeopardy.
At the beginning of the season, Shackley adjusted her position on the bike, which flared up a knee injury after racing Classic Brugge-De Panne in March.
The injury caused Shackley to miss out on racing her planned spring schedule, which included the Ardennes Classics and La Vuelta Femenina. She feared that she would have to skip the Worlds too.
“When I was injured, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way that I’m going to get selected,’” she said.
“It took quite a while to get rid of. I raced Volta Limburg [after De Panne], and it was pretty sore then. After that, I just couldn’t really ride. I still kept on kind of training through the start of April. Thinking back, I probably should have just taken a break then, and then maybe I would…
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