I’ve stopped being miserable after Mountain Mayhem. To be honest, I was surprised at how long I was grumpy and sad for after my pretty disastrous performance at that race. But for the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking forward again, despite my efforts on the bike being hampered somewhat by my still-niggling back injury (a result of the crash that put me out of the race in the first place) and a weird virus thing that I had last week that made me feel dizzy a lot and gave me a headache.

It helps that today, just two weeks later, I’m heading up to Fort William for 10 Under the Ben – a 10 hour race on a similar course to the excellent Relentless 24 hour event. Me and Dave are heading up there to each race solo and plan to “race straight out of the back of the van”. No frills. Smash-and-grab. Wayne’s coming with us to mend things that break and to keep us cheerful. It’s going to be brilliant and hopefully the ideal way to get right back into the swing of things.

A bit like the hillclimb I rolled up at last week. 3 quid on the line – a new experience for me and what’s more, I was the only person in the race (and perhaps of all time in the history of hillclimbs) to go the wrong way. I was going to make up some stuff about being abducted by aliens and I SWEAR the marshal that was guarding the junction that I took a wrong turn at was completely mute and therefore didn’t shout at me as I tore off up the wrong hill but then again I can’t really point fingers because nobody else got it wrong…..

As a result of that I came last, but who cares? It made the legs hurt and It was a laugh, especially when I turned up at the finish line just before search parties were deployed.

Dave didn’t get lost – in fact he did really well.

Soon, I’ll have a chance to ‘do it properly’ for 24 hours again at Twentyfour12 and before that I’m racing a fatbike again, riding a MTB marathon and I’ll be clocking up some serious training miles and laying off the pies.

After that I’ll be straight down to the chippy.