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.
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.
Sometimes, in spite of months of planning and training, things just don’t work out the way you planned. I’d put a lot into Mountain Mayhem this time. I put a lot into it every time, but this time I’d trained HARD. I’d even flown south to foreign climes to train hard and in the days before the event I felt great. I’d probably have been able to bend steel if I could have been bothered or if there was a group of ladies I was trying to impress.
But anyway. The start of the race eventually arrived and I started just as well as I’d done in Italy last year – maybe even a bit better than that – and completed the first 7 or so mile long, very hilly lap at the front of the solo field. “First soloist!” people were shouting. So far so good, only 23 and a bit hours to go. The course was dry and in spite of the climbs, it was very, very fast and entirely rideable.
The Niner Air 9 was also hugely impressive. I’d not had much chance to get impressed by it as all I’d done was ride to work on it, but I was properly shifting.
It rained during lap 2 and the course got very slippery and immediately long sections of the course, especially the climbs, were covered in riders pushing bikes (this was in spite of claims that the course would cope with rain better than the previous venue, but we’ll not go too much into that here).
Bike now caked in heavy clumps of mud, I swapped to my second bike at the end of that lap.
The course was now very muddy and there were many people walking with mud-clogged bikes. I swapped once again to my emergency (third!) bike, a rigid singlespeed and as you can see in the pic, it didn’t have a race number on the (very wide) bars, so I spent the lap being shouted at by marshals and a British Cycling official….
It had proper mud tyres on it as though, so I enjoyed lap three because I could steer, brake and go faster without being catapulted into the bushes.
That was until I was catapulted into the bushes.
I didn’t see the small tree stump hidden in the grass at the side of the course, I’ve also no idea why I strayed onto the grass. But I hit the stump at full speed with my front wheel. The bike immediately came to a halt and I carried on in a spectacular over-the-bars manoeuvre, landing awkwardly on my shoulder and left ear.
I got going again after I’d picked the mud out of my ear and I’d let out a couple of girly whines. My shoulder was now pretty sore but I was still enjoying the fact that I was getting quicker despite only having one gear that wouldn’t allow me to ride up all of the steep, muddy climbs (the bike was running a 34:17 on 29er wheels, gear nerds) so I rode through the pit without stopping. This was to save time and to signal to the guys and gals in the Team JMC pit that I was feeling good again. Back on it. Rarrrrrrrr……
…..aaaaarrrrrrrrggggh. I crashed again about 30 seconds after I’d gone through the pit. The first mildly interesting part of the course was a steep, downhill slope through some trees that had multiple lines down it. Some rutted by the dragging rear tyres of novices, other lines were neater but steeper – the territory of rad and super-skilled riders like me*. There was also a large group of spectators here, no doubt the bloodthirsty types that love to see people getting hurt (and who doesn’t?).
*The reality though is that I’m not super skilled and just to illustrate this, I fell off.
Not only did I fall off but I fell off quite spectacularly, leaving the bike to bounce down the trail in one direction while I rag-dolled in another. I landed with my back bent the wrong way with another tree stump jabbing into my arse. My multitool was jabbing my spine from my jersey pocket.
All I could hear was the gathered throng of thrill-seeking spectators laughing and cheering at my misfortune while one of them attempted to release my leg from the course marking tape.
Covered in mud, I stood up and got back on the bike and cursed at the pain in my lower back.
Eventually I arrived back at the pit without even wanting to know what my last lap time was. It wasn’t brilliant and Deb knew that there had been a problem. I got off the bike, painfully sat down and took some ibuprofen.
As my next lap progressed the pain in my lower back reached the stage where it was getting more and more difficult to put down any meaningful amount of power and I watched as a couple of other soloists that I recognised caught me up and rode away.
I thought about how I’d planned and looked forward to this race and compared it to the reality of what was actually happening right then. I can’t remember speaking to anyone during my fifth lap, I don’t think I even noticed anyone else on the course once it was clear that I was going to have to retire after just a few hours. It was like a nightmare. I just wanted to be somewhere else.
In a few days’ time I’ll have forgotten about the disappointment, feelings that I’ve let a load of people down will have disappeared, I’ll pull my shit together and I will have moved on from Mountain Mayhem. Instead, my plans for the next race will occupy my thoughts. I’ll appreciate the fact that I’m not going to spend the next few weeks recovering, that I can take my hard-earned fitness to 10 Under the Ben in two weeks and in five weeks I’ll be 24 hour solo racing again at Bontrager 24/12.
For now though, I’m still thinking about what might have been.
It’s less than a week until Mountain Mayhem. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve ridden this 24 hour race solo, but the sheer size of the event and the fact that seemingly the whole bike world turns up means that it’s always an exciting race and it’s still one of very few races that goes on the list first when I’m planning the year ahead.
It’s a new venue this time (we’re riding in Princess Anne’s back garden, basically) so there are even more questions and uncertainties than usual. Will there be enough space? What will the weather be like? How hilly will the course be? Will it turn into a quagmire if/when it rains? What tyres? What bike? What shoes? (ok, maybe not everyone is asking that last question).
Whatever happens, I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. My training in the past few weeks has been ok (it’s been at worst “regular stuff that I just about manage to fit in around daily life” and at best it’s been “Canary Island Awesome”), those supporting me have done this many times before, there are two Team JMC teams taking part too so I should be ok for getting any bike issues sorted and the bikes that I’m taking are brilliant – probably the best race bikes I’ve ever been lucky enough to take to any race before in fact so hopefully I’ll do them justice.
I’ve only just built the new Niner Air9 that Jungle have lent me and I’ve subsequently “tested” it in the time-honoured fashion by riding it to work and back a couple of times. Fortunately my commute contains some man-made mountain bike trails so I’ve been able to do a bit more than ride it down the main road and back.
I’ll get another couple of rides on it this week to get it set up a bit better. It’s been built with some super-lightweight parts from Mount Zoom so hopefully the course will have plenty of climbs so that I can feel the benefit. First impressions, not surprisingly for a crazy-light carbon bike, are that I think I can make it go very fast indeed. It’s also very, very, very orange, so that’s good too.
The other bike is quite different but just as ace (I’ve won races on it in fact) – a rigid Ti 29er, also built with Mount Zoom parts and some lovely Rolf Prima Ralos wheels that are lightweight, look great and also survived the Component Hell™ of the Strathpuffer without any lasting damage.
I’m even taking the racy singlespeed just in case the weather gets REALLY bad and the course falls to bits…
As usual I’ll be burning the retinas of all the marshals with lights from Exposure and I’ll be keeping the legs turning with the aid of fuel from Clif Bar. If you see me and I’m really chatty then I’ve probably just had a Turbo Double Expresso gel….
I’m also being helped out this time by SportPursuit who will have been helping me to recover from long training rides with some nice Nike compression clothing. The nice thing about this stuff is that it’s fairly thin and lightweight so I’ve been able to wear them in bed, even in Tenerife, all night without getting all sweaty. Pretty sexy image huh?
The Nike gear will be especially handy after Mountain Mayhem when I’ve got a couple of weeks to get ready for 10 Under the Ben, a couple of local midweek XC races, a couple of local summer cyclocross races, the Bowland Badass Sportive and only 5 weeks to recover and race another 24 hour solo at Bontrager 24/12. Sounds hectic, and it is; but you only live once don’t you? (I’m having a week’s holiday after all that).
Hopefully Princess Anne will have remembered to bring her washing in before we start at the weekend.
After months of rain, sleet, darkness and wind (not to mention the UK’s seemingly unique and special brand of aggressive motorists) a change of scenery was long overdue. We’d been planning our trip to Tenerife for months – the basic plan was that Dave and I would fly over there with our bikes in week one for some quality training and in week two our wives, girlfriends and kids would fly over and we’d have a week’s holiday (with some early morning cycling shoehorned in).
In the weeks before the trip, emails were sent back and forth with links to photos of wiggly mountain roads, articles about Tenerife being pretty much perfect for training (if it’s good enough for Wiggo…) and details of routes that included some very big hills indeed. It was going to be ace, we thought.
And it was. Better than that in fact. It was completely and utterly off-the-scale fantastic.
Our routine for the best part of a week consisted of breakfast, ride all day, eat, sleep, repeat. Our routes were pretty straightforward, “Up Teide and down the other side” or “the Masca loop that looks nice on the Internet” (it wasn’t – it was a tortuous, steep horror but the views were good) or “Let’s do a really big ride that climbs Teide twice and includes some other massive hills as well”. We made the most of it, in other words.
We did have a recovery ride on one day but as we found out, ‘recovery rides’ aren’t that possible when every single road seems to go up, down, up, down constantly – that ride to a café and back packed in 900 metres of climbing…..Tenerife – it’s no place for the weak and feeble.
Those few days – free from distractions and the stresses of everyday life so that every minute could be devoted to cycling (ok, we did watch football on the telly a couple of times) were arguably the hardest but probably the most enjoyable few days of cycling I’ve ever done.
The scenery was incredible. The climbs were long and punishing. The descents were amazing (including one road in particular that has to be one of the best roads to ride a bike down in the world). I pushed myself harder than I’ve done for a long time, if not ever – I had to; there simply aren’t any easy options anywhere on the island. I felt like I wasn’t being given a thorough kicking, rather I was enjoying the suffering knowing that it was going to yield fitness gains at a key time of the year. I’m sure Dave feels the same.
Our kit also never missed a beat. The bikes were impeccably reliable throughout the many hundreds of miles we covered. Not even a puncture between us! Our POC gloves that we’ve been using were used on every single ride, despite us both taking several pairs of ‘other brand’ gloves. Honestly, they’re that good (but smell a bit bad now) and the tons of Clif gels and Shot Bloks that we took were as good as ever, in fact they’re even easier to eat when the temperature reaches 25 degrees 😉
Once Deb, Angela, Michael and the girls joined us the weekend after, we were both pretty much ready to relax and enjoy a holiday. The sun came out properly and we had a good laugh, a trip to the zoo, a boat ride and Dave even hired a crap car to whisk Angela up the mountain roads the easy way. There was some cycling too – but more of the shorter (if you can call 4 hours short), early morning (5am! On holiday!) but no less hilly kind of rides that keeps things ticking over and makes sure that we’re both back by breakfast with the day’s training all done and a smug grin on our faces.
I’ve never really set the world alight at any of the previous 24 or 12 Hours of Exposure races – I’ve been there-or-thereabouts in the top few but I’ve never reached the podium. Various reasons – but mainly because it’s a bloody fast race where the field is normally stacked with talent and there’s normally only a very limited number of steps on a podium….
That didn’t seem to prevent me from being ‘gridded’ again this year. Its always nice to start right at the sharp end :-).
I was taking up a fair amount of room on the front row aboard the Surly Moonlander – one of just four fat bikes in the 12 hour race. My plan, if you read my previous blog post, was to finish reasonably high up but realistically I wasn’t going to be breathing down the necks of the usual podium botherers. A fatbike category win (yes, a fatbike category at our national championships, folks) and a top ten overall place would be good, I decided. There aren’t enough fat bikes in the race to make it a proper scrap, so I’d have to turn my attention to everyone else.
Whatever happens, the plan was to have a good laugh, admittedly look a bit weird but do a nice job of things.
In the minutes before the start, several confused and sometimes pitying glances were thrown in my direction. One or two semi-sarcastic “good luck with that” comments were uttered. Riding this thing for 12 hours looked like it was going to be a slow, arduous ordeal rather than “fast” or even “fun”.
I knew differently, of course. I knew that despite my bike weighing twice as much as those I was racing against (a lot of that mass in the wheels and tyres too so I was always going to lose out in a drag race), I knew that I wasn’t going to be terribly bothered about picking lines across root-infested singletrack and I could stay off the brakes for a long, long time on bumpy descents. I’d need to be throwing my bodyweight around a fair bit because the course was very twisty and narrow in places and I had no idea at all how the tyres were going to perform if the course became wet but I was looking forward to cracking on and seeing how fast I could go.
In time-honoured fashion the race got underway at a ridiculous speed. I was leading the entire race for all of 20 seconds when I started to be overtaken by what seemed like dozens of other riders while I patiently increased the speed of my rolling behemoth. You can see my GoPro “seatpost cam” footage of the start here (the battery in the camera soon ran out though)
It wasn’t long though before I started to catch people up again and within a couple of laps I’d moved back into a more favourable position.
I was loving it. The course was rapidly drying out following the rain of the previous evening and as my familiarity with the course increased, so did my confidence in the bike and more specifically, the benefits that the massive tyres were giving me.
Out of the saddle climbs on steep, loose surfaces were no problem at all. I was tearing up slopes while others had to sit and spin – my rear tyre providing insane amounts of traction. I was able to lean the bike over and corner more quickly than I imagined I would be able to and the amount of cushioning on offer was just phenomenal. Riding downhill was also silly-fast – once I’d got the hang of popping the front wheel up into the air to clear roots and small obstacles and I also started to ignore the brakes more and more, I was tearing downhill and started to record some quite startling lap times. It was almost too easy. I was invincible. I was squashing and crushing and annihilating my way up the field and nobody I went past was going to catch me…..
Cheers rang out as I rumbled through the pit lane, mostly having too much fun to bother stopping. I was actually looking forward to every new lap, knowing for certain that I’d probably be able to knock a few seconds off here and there for taking an even sillier line across some roots or by staying in the air for a bit longer on a bumpy downhill bit.
In actual fact the uphill bits were (somewhat inevitably) starting to get a bit painful after seven hours or so – the weight of the bike was starting to slow me down a little bit but who isn’t a bit sore after riding any bike like a nutter for 7 hours?
“Do you want to put on another layer of clothing?” asked Rachael when I finally came in to pit. “nah, I’m quite warm as I am, thanks” I replied and rode off, leaving my glasses on the table.
Within 2 minutes of starting that lap the heavens opened and pelted everyone with freezing-cold rain and hail. The temperature dropped by a few degrees and the course got very, very wet and slippery as my massive tyres threw gallons of water onto every inch of my body. A few minutes later, mud in both eyes, I stopped having fun and started shivering. The slipperiness of the course, especially the off-camber sections were showing me the limitations of my tyres – fatbike tyres are after all designed to ‘float’ rather than ‘cut through’ which meant that steering and riding forwards was occasionally a challenge – as a result I was having to get off the bike quite a bit so I was getting quite cold.
One slow lap later and a arrived back at the pit where I spent 20 minutes changing my clothes, pulling on waterproofs and shivering over a cup of something warm while the whole pit lane was a furious mass of riders getting changed, drinking warm beverages and helpers running around and digging in various bags of clothes. Dave and Phil separately arrived at the Team JMC pit, both of them in similar states of hypothermia as everyone else.
Suddenly this was a different race. I rode the for the next few hours maintaining my position but often pushing the bike across slippery mud. I knew that I was at this point the 3rd-placed veteran rider (and I was winning the fat bike category) but for how long? My lap times were almost double what they were and despite the deteriorating course conditions affecting everyone it was surely only a matter of time before I was caught by other riders on bikes more suited to mud….
Sure enough, on the final lap of the race, the vet in 4th place caught and overtook me. I recognised him as he took off and tried to increase the gap. Hurrah – a last-lap high-speed dogfight for the final podium position on a muddy course with a bloke on a bike that weighs a fraction of mine. Just what I needed. Ace!
To anyone watching, the next 20 minutes would have been hilarious. Both of us were riding out of our skins – one of us would crash and the other would wobble past until they crashed and then the other wobbled past…and so it continued until the final few hundred metres of the course that went along a gravel track, through the pit lane and into the start/finish area. Yep, the 3rd-place vets spot would be decided in a sprint.
As soon as we got to the gravel track we were off and immediately a gap appeared with me lagging behind slightly as I put as much power as I could through the cranks to get the Moonlander to accelerate. Gravel was spat from the rear wheel as I gradually started to gain on him, the rumble from my tyres getting louder and louder until the noise of heavy breathing was drowned out and I was back on his wheel. Halfway through the pit lane the speed increased again and I moved over and somehow managed to get past – only by a couple of bike lengths – before having to lean the bike over hard to the right into the start/finish….
I was terrified. I expected the front wheel to do precisely what it’s designed to do and float on top of the waterlogged grass and wash out immediately, dumping me out of the podium places in front of the gathered crowd. But it gripped. I made it around the bend and I crossed the line with about 5 seconds to spare.
You want your racing to be exhilarating, but that was ridiculous.
I’d aimed to win the fat bike category and finish as high up the ‘normal’ field as I could. As it turned out I’d ridden the Moonlander to not only the category win but also 3rd place vet and 6th place overall. So yeah, pretty chuffed with that.
(does this mean I’m the European and UK 12 Hour Fat Bike Champion?)
Thanks to Roy for talking the race organisers into having a fat bike category at their race, Judy at Beerbabe.co.uk for making the brilliant trophy, Rachael and Angela for keeping me fed and watered with a never-ending supply of Clif drinks and Shot Bloks and to Keep Pedalling in Manchester for loaning me perhaps the coolest bike I’ve ever ridden.
Jase 