Mountain Mayhem
Tony impressed the hell out of me last weekend. As I mentioned last week, we were racing in the Saab Salomon Mountain Mayhem 24-hour mountain bike race. And while it may not have been held over real mountains, there was certainly plenty of mayhem. I had the dubious honour of going out on the first lap, which entailed an 800m run to our waiting bikes. We were told that the start of the race would be marked by 'an explosion of some sort', and sure enough, after a colossal bang, I found myself in a mad scramble for the line, dodging elbows and breathing clouds of light-brown dust.
As none of our four-strong team had test-ridden the 7.2-mile route, I had no idea what to expect. It soon transpired that the course's designers subscribed to Marx's view that 'the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain', as the event delivered equally hefty doses of both. The climbs were hellishly long, 'granny-gear' drags that wove through impossibly hot patches of breeze-free air, and the descents (eye-wateringly fast, crazy off-camber turns, huge bumps baked rock-hard in the midday sun) would have had your average kamikaze pilot thinking twice.
Anyway, back to Tony. He'd never actually raced a mountain bike before. The week before the race, I found out that pro rider Jenny Copnall had described the 2004 Mountain Mayhem as 'one of the most extreme experiences I have had on a bike'. Tony and I do most of our training on the road, and our lack of technical bike-handling skill soon proved a big disadvantage. He crashed hard on his second lap, headbutting a tree. I'll let him describe what actually happened, and I was hugely happy (although hardly surprised) to see him carry on for another 18 hours of racing.
It was a wonderful event, and I was utterly humbled by the gang of solo riders that spent the whole 24 hours lapping the course alone. Worryingly, I seemed to get stronger as the race (and the lack of sleep) went on, and I'm now toying with the idea of doing a few solo events after SOUTH. The chances of me matching the lap times of some of the top team riders is slim (there were two Olympic athletes and a T-Mobile pro in attendance) but I reckon I'd be competitive in the solo category. Of course, it'd also give me an excuse to buy a camper van as well…