It's taken me a week not to write anything about Mayhem. Somewhat amusingly, I managed to assemble a team consisting entirely of people called 'Dave', well, apart from me, obviously, I'm not called Dave.
Friday... note traditional clouds...
But the things I'll remember aren't really the racing - we did okay by the way, ninth in vets sub-class, or 'oldies' I think it's called, yep, officially an old bastard and 27th in Sport Men out of around 110 and 250 teams respectedly - but actually it was mostly just a really nice weekend.
Warm, sunny, hot, dry, and loads of mates to bump into a chat with. And I had a teepee, a nordic one made by a company called Tentipi and it was properly ace. A really nice vibe. Super practical and, get this, because it has an adjustable vent at the top, you can have a firebox inside the teepee...
... so, at three in the morning, when normally you're huddled in a sleeping bag or draped shivering in a belay jacket between laps, we were grouped around a crackling fire feeling, erm, hot. Which was brilliant. And next day, when the sun was doing its own scorched earth thing and normal tents were performing a passable imitation of a sauna, inside the teepee, it was, as Kevin McCloud, or however he's spells it, might say 'cool and light and airy'. Really nice. Goes well with the the prayer flags too. And the Horror Cat.
As a team we did okay, as an individual, hmmm, well. I guess the thing that's been driving me in biking terms has been soloing 24/12, the 24-hour version, so a lot of what I've been doing has been long, hilly and steady. Not a lot of intense threshold stuff. I did some sprinty intervals in the four weeks before, so I had a proper singletrack overtaking spurt, but...
So the first two laps were briskish but in a sub-threshold way, and then I sort of lost interest, or not so much lost interest, but didn't have the motivation to hurt myself. And didn't really fuel properly either. Which was ironic given that someone spent a big chunk of last year trying to convince me that I was overly aggressive - yeah, right - and there I was without the competitive urge needed to punch my way out of a wet paper bag. Fierce, me...
But there you go. I'll leave the fast racing to the fast people and most of my mates went pretty well, the odd podium and some quick laps and one unfortunate crash. And the most important thing was that apart from one dark cloud of a conversation that I kind of wish I hadn't had now, it was a weekend of sunshine and lightness.
Got to stop that bloody Maverick from creaking though... If someone finds my creative urge, could they post it to me please. I feel like I've been run over by a steam roller. Which in a way I suppose I have.
