The Friday before the event it rained and rained and rained. Proper "lead item on the news" kind of rain. This didn't fill me with hope, and I changed my plans from camping from the Friday to driving down on the Saturday. I'd heard that the course would hold up relatively well to the rain (compared to say, a giant sandcastle) but I still wan't brimming with keenness.
Saturday morning was slightly better and I arrived about 8am to meet Jackie and Nick (pit bitch #1). We soon had the super-gazebo up and there was a fairly relaxed pre-race few hours, with a bit of a test ride. The course was rideable, we did the first couple of singletrack sections which turned out to be the hardest of the whole lap.
Then the rest arrived - Jon and Phill riding as a pair, Caroline riding solo and Caroline's assistant Tessa (I'm not sure if it's quite correct to call a girl a pit bitch). Start time came around and off we went.
Things started reasonably, I was going too fast as usual at the beginning and rode round with Jackie for a lap or so - not deliberately, we were just doing the same speed. I stopped on the first lap to help Jon, who had a puncture and had forgotten how to use a bicycle pump. The were the usual chats with the usual people, including one guy on a singlespeed who I've only ever spoken to at events, mainly whilst riding. The track was just starting to dry... and then it rained. All got a bit gloopy then, especially in a couple of sections which were total slurry pits. I'm sure I saw the top of some guy's helmet just breaking the surface - he must have hit the deep bit.
About the start of lap 7 (about 7.5 hours in) something went ping. And not in a good way, in a "hmm, that was something fleshy breaking" way. Thing was, it only really hurt under power, just above my left knee. Normal pootling was fine (which was 96% of the time by now) but any kind of burst, e.g. getting out of a dangerously deep slurry pit, caused some real "oweeeee" moments. I was really in two minds whether to carry on, but my natural cowardliness won in the end and I quit at the end of the seventh lap (about 8.5 hours in).
It was a really brutal course in the end - no real respite because it was fairly flat, so no long downhills. There were a few people who just keeled over in the woods for a bit of a sleep, and a few more who were still moving but had lost all sense of reality. Great atmosphere though - I was even asked if I was OK when I stopped for a piss. Fine thanks, I'm quite good at it by now.
Jackie ran out of gas at 7 laps too (considering she did the Transrockies a couple of weeks before, I'm not surprised), Phill and Jon managed 11 laps between them, and Caroline did brilliantly, keeping riding til the end and putting in 8 laps. All in all - a tough, worthwhile event.
My next challenge will be a 13 hour blindfolded singlespeed ride.
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