To state the bleeding obvious, I’m really a very long way away from the standards of sporting excellence of Sir Steve Redgrave.
I don’t know how well this quote is known outside Britain or outside rowing circles, but after winning gold in the Atlanta Olympics, Redgrave declared, “I hereby give permission to anybody who catches me in a boat again to shoot me”.
Four months later he started training again, and won gold at a fifth consecutive Olympics in Sydney.
Although I might have needed a rather different set of genes and a lifetime of dedication even to dream of achieving that level of success, I think I know what he meant. And indeed, I suspect a number of we marathon MTBers know what he meant – that familiar pattern of: frequently painful race, followed swiftly by swearing never to do it again, followed remarkably quickly by the hatching of a plan to, yet again, do the next one.
Luckily I didn’t say it to an assembled audience of the British press like Sir Steve did, but as clubmate Stuart Spies and I were completing the last of a lot of laps at the Original Source Mountain Mayhem 24-hour race at the weekend, I said to Stu that I thought that would be the last time I did anything as stupid as ride my mountain bike round and round in circles for 24 hours. Well what do you know? The mind really is quite good at forgetting the suffering, and replacing it with memories of the atmosphere, the good bits of the course, and the thought of wanting to have another crack at it in order to post a better performance. So here we are, only just over a single day since I got off my bike at the end of the race, wondering whether I should go and have a crack at the UK 24hr champs next year.
Mountain Mayhem certainly wasn’t the gentle reintroduction to mountain bike racing that would have been sensible when coming back from injury. But then again, what was I to do? The entry had gone in before I did the injury in the first place, I had a team-mate to race with (or technically speaking “against”, since we were in the solo event), and an astonishingly willing support crew lined up.
In the end, lots of things could have been a lot worse: I could have fallen off and re-broken my collarbone; it could have tipped with rain or hours on end; I could have snapped a mech hanger one mile into the lap and had to walk the remaining nine miles with the bike over my shoulder, as a team-mate had to a couple of years ago.
The stats in the end? Zero mechanicals. 15 laps, at about 10 miles a throw. Somewhere above 5,000m height gain – Garmin batteries don’t last 24 hours. No idea how many calories consumed, but probably north of 10k. And 12th place, out of about 160 other idiots who were also prepared to ride round in circles for 24 hours. Clubmate Stu was 18th, one lap behind after having knee problems.
As with any race (at least every race you didn’t win, which is a lot for me…), I find myself wondering how I could have gone faster.
Lesson number one is not to get carried away when you think you’re chasing a podium position (apparently I was lying 4th at about 10pm – a long way to go from there though!), over-caffeinate at midnight and promptly destroy your digestive system.
Lesson number two was the unsurprising one that riding your mountain bike once in three months, for two hours, does not prepare the body for spending 24 hours on it. In the end, it wasn’t fatigue that was the limiting factor, but the pain in my hamstrings and ankle – the kind of sharp, stabbing pain that says “don’t you dare turn another pedal-stroke”.
One thing that certainly couldn’t have been better was our support crew – Collyn and Rusty were amazing, never missing a beat with food, coffee, mechanical assistance and moral support. It just underlined how difficult it would be to be remotely competitive in an event like this without such support. Although they did pull a fast one when I insisted on lying down for an hour at about 2:30, waking me up after half an hour and assuring me I had been asleep for the full hour… Evil.
Next year? Maybe. I can still hope, however, that good sense will prevail and I’ll resist downloading the entry form.