All last week I’d been thinking about what to do Sunday, I had a ‘day pass’ and originally I was going to ride with Deadly and the Brighton MTB crew as well. I noticed that round one of the “Merida Brass Monkeys Enduro” was on and was pondering entering, but when I went and looked it said entries were full. A chance glance at the web site on Friday morning revealed they’d released another 100 places and I had till 12:00 to enter, a stroke of good luck, so I signed myself up for 2 hours 40+.
It’s fair to say in the last five or so years I’ve largely ignored traditional XC events in favour of the longer enduro style ones. Doing 24 hour team, 12, 8, 6 and 4 hour solo events too. I figured 2 hours would be a good test to see if I still had any XC legs left.
Not a good start
The weather was rubbish when I got up and I loaded the car in pouring rain, driving through some fairly biblical weather to Rushmoor Arena, near Aldershot. I don’t know about you but I hate getting to an event in the wet, then having to sart in the rain too, a little dry wouldn’t go amiss!
The promise of dry weather?
As I said above the event was full and the registration process meant the start got held up, I think quite a few changed category to the 2 hour option. In the end we started half an hour late at 10:30, with the 4 hour races starting behind us a bit later. For once the start was not too frantic as the start straight was totally waterlogged and muddy. Pulling out of the arena and onto the course proper I was pleased to find I could maintain a decent pace and I was steadily overtaking people.
The course was a decent mix of singletrack and fire roads, with a few nice technical bits too, yet again though I was amazed by some of the other competitors, you’d think some people just don’t ride in the winter. There was a lot of slipping and sliding going on. Once the faster 4 lap riders started coming through on my third lap I was reminded that I could go a bit quicker so I spent that lap catching peoples wheels wherever possible when they overtook and hanging on for as long as I could.
By this time though both my brakes were down to the backing plates and half way round I’d pretty much hit the wall, I was happy to see PlusOne (hats off to you for completing 5 laps in those conditions BTW) when he passed and I begged him for food! I’ve never been so pleased to see a Clif Bar, it tasted good as well. Amazingly I bounced back after that pretty quickly and was able to put some effort in for the remainder of the lap.
Shattered but happy (yes, really!)
So in the end I managed to put 3 laps in, in about 2 1/2 hours and I ended up 17th out of 67 in the 2 hour 40+ category. I’m really chuffed with that result as I’ve not done anything like that for a while. The bug has bitten again so I’ll be doing some XC stuff over the coming months.
Hummerlicious
