January 14th, 2006
Strathpuffer 1.0 - Kids in Jeans
A 10 a.m. start to 24 hour racing seems perfect. Crawl out of bed, sign on, bacon and egg roll, and just time to put the bike together before the off. There’s no phoney-war of nerves between being ready to go and having to go.
I don’t care what the official time of sunrise is, but I catch a shot of it finally clearing the horizon at 09.33 a.m.
dR j0n has the dubious honour of first lap, and is back in less than fourty minutes. This with the Le-Mans style run and changing out of running and into cycling shoes. My first lap comes round far far too quickly, just two hours and twenty minutes into the race. It’s obvious who the cows tail is going to be on this team.
I really enjoy my first lap, and could start to get evangelical about singlespeeds again. After a year of riding my Turner - a nice bike in itself - it was great to get back on something a bit more lively. I may even have tried to “get some air”.
Knowing that this is possibly the only lap I’ll get in daylight I take my camera out. Scotland does not disappoint though my shooting prowess does. Bah. The course is a mixture of fireroad climb, some hobbit lined singletrack (or so I wrote in the race diary), and a heck of a lot of mud. It ends with a singletrack blast through the trees that has me grinning like the loon I am. There is not enough of that kind of rooty steppy singletrack in the world and I could have ridden it all day.
Laps two and three are a nightmare. My seatpost starts to slip right from the off, and when I try and tighten the bolt - you guessed it - it rounds off. After two unsuccesful attempts to improve things I resign myself to riding with my knees round my ears. I finish the lap with the seat about three inches down and the unusual position is giving me cramp. I have to do something. As I faff around at the pits trying to swap it for a bottle cage bolt (same thread but too short) some guys wander over to see what the problem is. They then reappear with a perfect bolt. Thanks guys! Once more into the breach ect ect.
Perhaps inspired by seeing me with a bike looking more like a dirt jumper I am then accosted for the next lap by the “effing kid in jeans”. Every race has one. There you are busting a lung up a climb, about to vomit, when some kid on a cheap Taiwanese iron thing comes past in jeans (baggy), trainers (soft-soled), and a full face lid as if they’re cruising the local park pissed up on cheap alco-pops. OK, so this kid was on a bona-fide cross country bike, but I spent an hour being patronised as he hung back on climbs to talk at me. His accent was as thick as a Clydesdale welders and I sound like Vernon Kay, so communication was always bound to be troublesome. I hope I wasn’t too rude.
The night skies are clear and the temperature has dropped. The fire-road climb is now officially freezing and my front tyre throws up ice crystals that glitter in my light. Cheesy and obvious as I am I end up humming ‘Glittering Prize’ by Simple Minds. The muddier sections are also a bit more rideable in the cold. I hope it will freeze up solid, if rutted.
I finally managed to shake off jeans boy at the top of the last descent only for him to catch me in the technical section at the very end of the course.
When I got back to the team motorhome I swore.
A lot.
I feel like I haven’t slept but my iPod playlist says differently - I certainly don’t remember hearing Overkill.
Midnight is more than halfway through though we seem to have been riding in the dark forever.
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