My bike was missing some essentials. The two outer chainrings were bent and the rear disc rotor was bent (All courtesy of Easyjet and their moron baggage handlers). I nipped out at lunchtime to get replacement bits, rebuilt my bike in the evening, and then got picked up at 9am on the Saturday morning to go down to the race.

The course was a good mix of technical and non technical sections. I managed all of the descents on my first lap which just shows either how much my riding has improved, or how confidence-building the course was.

It was dry til about 1am, after that the rain came in for 2 hours and made everything slippery, the course was dry again by about 8am.

My night laps were my most enjoyable and fastest laps. I'm very pleased with my lap times and generally very pleased with how my riding is improving. I climb fast and my decents are getting much faster, I still struggle to find the line through tight singletrack. I didn't walk a single bit of the course.

Joolz, the legendary photographer who photographs all the events got this great photo of me.

I did a double lap at about 7am in the morning and it wasn't until I had just started the first lap that I noticed that my Marzocchi Bombers (front suspension forks) had been leaking air. I bottomed out on everything for the whole two laps, and recovered from some worrying front wheel slides, but on the plus side, it made my climbing more efficient. I borrowed a shock pump and got them pumped up in time for the lap after that.

Here are the results for our team. We came 50th out of 83 mixed teams, and that's good considering that we were a 4 person team, whereas most mixed teams were 5 people.

Just out of interest, I've gone through the results and found all the other teams in the mixed category with only 4 riders.
High Peak Cycles were 24th
The High Peak Cycles A Team were 46th.... You've put all the slow people on the A team?
Fig Racing Rolls (Us) were 50th
Team AT1 were 74th

Our A Team (Fig Rolls Racing) came 4th which was superb. They would have needed another lap under their belts to get onto the podium.

Lap 24 was a really sloppy changeover. Luke came in at about 45, I got to the coralle at about 46, so he spent 13 minutes looking for me then finally came back to find me on the hour. I noted down the changeovers that were slow so that I could work out the actual racing time for those laps:

Lap 24 was a 13 minute changeover, bringing the actual time racing down to 47 minutes.

Looking at the full results for the mixed category I reckon we could have made up 3 places if we had nailed the changeovers. Also, if we had managed to get another lap in as a result of getting the changeovers timed better then we may have made up another 5 places.

When I handed over to Steve, I came in at midnight, and Steve went out at 6 minutes past on Lap 13, so Steve's actual time for that lap was a speedy 45 minutes.

I'll be entering Dusk til Dawn in October, hopefully in a team of 3. That's a 12 hour race in the hours of darkness between 8pm Sat and 8am Sunday.

So that's what I did with my weekend. It's the best weekend I've had in ages, and I hope to do enter single 24 hr bike race in the country next season...