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Trentham Gardens, 25-26th August 2001 Featuring: Pete Kerr You can't prepare for a twenty four hour race. OK, maybe you can go riding lots when it's dark, or make sure that you don't get lost driving through London and turn up at the campsite at 11pm the night before, or maintain a careful diet of Pot Noodles in readiness for what you'll have to eat on the day, or charge up your lights, or remember not to get really drunk that week and stagger around hungover the day before. But it won't really make a difference. It's not like you can practise losing the ability to speak English, after all. Or practice sweating. If there's one thing we left up north, it would be a hell of a lot of perspiration. Even riding through the woods at midnight, I was so hot I couldn't see properly; sweat was pouring down my face, into my eyes, dissolving the glue that held my Oakleys together, soaking through into my nose so all I could smell was some kind of lemon-and-lime flavoured brine, and then dripping off my chin. You'd meet somebody down by the finish line and they'd be wringing out the inside of their helmet, and pints of sweat would be coursing off them; not little globules, but more like somebody had turned the tap on and it was stuck on full blast. But enough of sweat for the moment: here is the tale of Team ARSE (Addiscombe's Really Senseless Endeavour) and our battle against mud, sleep, and any kind of sensibleness. We started at 2 on Saturday afternoon. Out of extreme sadism, or just for a laugh, the race started with a half mile run, down the hill and up through the campsite, before all the riders ran back through the woods to where their bikes were being held. Sylvain got on his bike, disappeared into the woods, and then came back out again 44 minutes later, which was when I jumped on my bike and careered off down the track. To save energy, I hadn't ridden a practice lap. Well, I'd tried, but on the first drop off I fell off and almost stacked head first into an imposing tree trunk, so I figured it was better to cut my losses early. I'd got back to the race briefing oozing sweat and covered in mud; much like any other ride, I suppose. Anyway, going out riding now meant the course was really fresh and novel for me. So fresh, in fact, that the picture the photographer took of me, five minutes into the first lap I rode, still made me look like a recently exhumed corpse. Still, I could take lots of amusement in having to push my bike up a hill so evil that the race organisers had painted the words "VERY SORRY" on the earth at the bottom. The rest of the course was a blur the first time round; by putting in three horrible climbs the course had somehow been engineered with more downs than ups, with so much great singletrack that it all meshed together, until the only bit you could clearly remember was the last ludicrous descent, straight down a muddy slope for a few hundred yards, with no grip whatsoever. It was the kind of hill where you hugged each other at the bottom if you managed to get down it. If. Every time I went down it I either came off or crashed into the bracken on either side; even when I walked down it when my lights had gone, I managed to lose it and slide down a few bits. After the final big descent, there was a big ring blast back down past a lake, a couple of little drop offs to ride, and then straight past the Addiscombe encampment, through a ditch in the woods and down a slick grassy slope to the finish line. Then back to the van, to eat instant mashed potatoes. It didn't rain at all during the race, but it had rained the night before and the whole course was a bit slimy. As the second day went by, this started to dry off, but in the middle of the night you couldn't see what you were riding on, and often ending up spinning out in the middle of a puddle of boggy mud. Everyone skidding down the last descent wore away quite a lot of the mud, and that just made it worse, because then you were bouncing over rocks which gave even less grip than the mud had. All the descents seemed to have a bog of mud at the bottom, sometimes with a conveniently placed treestump to rapidly abort your slide... And the mud itself was some strange ninja breed of dirt, capable of teleporting straight through the lens of your glasses and right into your eye. Most impressive at seven in the morning, standing in a field weeping and trying to get the muck back out. So every few hours, you'd go down to the start line, stand around for a few minutes and wait to be handed the magical Shimano key ring, then rush off round the course again, the bike going sideways every time you pedalled on some of the muddy sections, hoping the swans at the lake wouldn't come after you, trying to avoid sitting on the saddle because it was too painful. Even though there were close to three hours between each lap to begin with, the time would race by; I lived in fear that at any moment Sylvain would ride past the van, yelling that it was time to go out again. Or just screaming out "ARSE" at the top of his voice, which always seemed to startle the riders ahead of us as we reached the woods. As it got dark, we started doing two laps each. Five minutes into the first half of my two night laps, I got paranoid that my batteries were going to run out of power, so I went into stealth mode: just my head torch and my back up commuter light. Unfortunately, I hadn't managed to fix it securely to the handlebar, so it either illuminated my front disc brake or shone straight up my nose. I began to go a bit slower, and at the same time, began to get a massive headache. First of all I thought this was down to dehydration, but I was drinking loads of water. Then I tried removing the headtorch and the complementary bandanna from my head; with the pressure eased, blood could flow around my brain again and I was able to ride some more. But with the bandanna removed, and with my hair freshly shaved off, there was nothing to soak up the sweat; at one in the morning, perspiration was still dripping off me like I was a fat old bluffer at a step aerobics class. Somehow I made it through my two laps, only finding out near the end that my battery was still full of juice, and it was only the power gauge that was defective, and then I crawled into the tent to sleep for an hour or two. I was rather galled to find out how slow I'd gone - two and a half hours to ride the course twice; Pete had managed it twenty two minutes faster, even without a skewer through his front wheel on one lap. Forgetfulness had probably helped him; the kind that lets you ride down drop offs without concentrating on the thought that your front wheel could be just about to fall out of your fork. The same kind of forgetfulness that meant when I tried to buy a jacket potato for breakfast with mushrooms on it, all I could say was "I'll mush jacket with have a room on" until someone else translated. The kind of forgetfulness that the organisers had catered for, by getting a man to wash the mud off your bike for you (at three in the morning, the last thing you can be trusted with is a high pressure water hose). The same kind which got Pete to buy a packet of fruit pastilles and then be incapable to doing anything apart from stare at them on the table in the café for ten minutes. Or like Sylvain forgetting entirely about speaking English, and just asking "c'est bon? C'est bon?" when I next clambered into the tent. (I couldn't face the thought of French that early in the morning, and just grunted at him until he realised he was in England again ...) Sylvain probably had a good excuse for this, being as he kept doing double laps when the rest of us had reverted to single ones. Given that Sylvain is the incredible lapping machine, and managed to ride faster and longer than all the rest of us, it's tempting to put him in for the solo next year (although maybe not tell him, just lob croissants over the race tape as he goes past and shout "one more lap!" to encourage him) ... His hunger for no laps caught me out. As we approached one o'clock, with everyone worn out, I went off for one more lap, under strict instructions not to return before the magic 2 o'clock barrier was breached. Otherwise, somebody would have to go and ride another lap. Conscious of this, I braved a bunny hop going past the commentary van, and then hammered it as fast as I could round the course anyway, before coming to a rest with some other riders under a tree just before the last section of trail. Here I'd wait until 2 o'clock, and then ride down triumphantly. I stood there, contemplating the genius of the circuit; a gentle gravel climb at the start to warm up with, then some dodgy drop offs, then a lake with swans in it, then a nasty little climb, a roller coaster along the top of a ridge, another awful climb and then miles of singletrack, then one last climb and all that mad descending afterwards, followed by a weave past the campsite to show off at the end of each lap. Wondrous. And the sun was shining, and I was grinning like a mad man, and it was all about to come to a peaceful, blissfully sedate close. After a few minutes, I spied Pete walking up towards us. "Two minutes" he shouted out. "Sure, I'll come down in two minutes" I called back. "No, come now! Sylvain's waiting on the start line!" So back on the bike, and then careering down the trail, past the gate with two army cadets standing guard, past the van and into the woods, dodging between pink-spraypainted stumps of trees, down the ditch, up the other side, and then almost slap bang into all the racers who had been hiding in the trees waiting for the 2 o'clock cut off, and were now emerging right in my path. I yelled at the top of my voice, narrowly avoided ramming two guys, and then sped down to the finish as fast as I could. All the crowd seemed to be yelling at me as I arrived and jammed the keyring into Sylvain's hand - I'd made it with just 10 seconds to go, and beer had never tasted so sweet as the one that Adam handed me. Sylvain then tore off and did his second fastest (by two seconds) lap, while the rest of us slumped on the grass in the sunshine. How cool was it that we were the team that had managed to send the very last rider out that day? Way cool. And how much cooler that three of us could sit there, drinking beer, while Sylvain sped round again? Twenty four hours, thirty nine minutes and twenty eight seconds of riding round and round and round - two hundred and eighteen miles. No big crashes, only one mechanical (and Shimano gave Pete a new skewer bolt for free) and the only puncture we had was the slow one on my front tyre, which stayed inflated until exactly 2.15 on Sunday afternoon... The drive back was fun for everyone - the only thing keeping Sylvain awake was Red Bull and Burger King induced stomach pain, and Pete had all the fun of driving back to London and then up to Warwick again. Plus we all seemed to be so saddle sore that sitting down wasn't much fun, and difficult tasks like opening the car door and stumbling to your bed were still ahead of you... It's Tuesday now, and I'm still exhausted, but dead chuffed to have done this, and already getting ready to try the Enduro 6 at Trentham Gardens in four weeks. Then, if Adam can face what we were discussing between laps on Sunday morning, it might be time to start practising for a solo tandem entry for the Red Bull...
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