Having blown my knees out on the road bike during the week, I was going to be happy to finish this race. I spent the Saturday hobbling around like an old man in a fair bit of pain, so I took some anti inflamitories and rubbed in sport injury cream the night before the race and wondered how I would be when I woke up...
I felt pretty good, but could still feel my knees were unhappy, I could walk pain free though, so things were on the up and up, maybe after a lap or two they would warm up and be fine, or maybe they would lock up and would I end up off the bike for a few weeks recovering, thankfully they got me through the event and to my amazement, they feel great today. That's left me wondering about that road bike... I'll have to spend some time checking seat position and stuff this week.
Anyway, back to the race, what a screaming course, Paul Cole had outdone him self, the course was shorter this year, and it had much less climb, this mean it was fast fast fast. Loads of fun too, with lots of Sparrow's best flowy single track.
The start was madness, everyone bunched up at the front, I decided mid field was the place for me and hung out in the middle. On the start I pushed "go" on my Polar, only to have an empty screen as my reply, the thing just died! A few seconds later it came back to life, completely reset back to factory defaults. No distance, speed or cadence feedback for me, but thankfully I would have heart rate and timing data, which would prove critical to me later.
The first 4 hours just flew by, I had planned to cruise this race, but the pace of the field was hot, just I just went with it. The course was so good and it was easy to hold a good rhythm. After the 4th hour though, pain started to surface... my knees were tingling, my lower back spasming and my shoulders and triceps were screaming at me. It was not good.
I came into transition sore, but amazingly, after 4 hours of going hard, I had finally caught up to Al, damn that guy is fast! I transitioned as quick as could, ignored the pain and took off hard, getting the jump on him (dirty tactic on I know! haha), he replied though, and reeled me back in very quickly. He caught and passed me and I tried to keep up. We rode together for this lap, and it was great to have some company, he too was suffering pretty badly, his legs were toasted, no cramps, but lots of pain, we empathised, and both speculated our races may be over, with 3 hours to go and so much pain, we were in a bad place.
At the next transition I cracked out the Ibuprophin, and gave some to Al, we shoveled in some food and headed straight out together, the pace had dropped somewhat, but by the time we reached "Ice Dam", I was feeling much better, I had switched to Gels for fuel and the pain killers had kicked in, Al said "you lead for a while" and I just took off, I felt great.
I managed to hold that pace for the rest of the race, I knew if I stayed sub 40min on my lap times, I would get a bonus lap at the end, and I would cut it fine to make it through before the race ended, with two hours to go, a little maths revealed I would have 2 minutes to spare if I held sub 40 pace... that lifted me, to have a challenge, so that's what go me through the last two hours.
I made the cut off with a few minutes to spare, skulled a Red Bull and gave my beautiful wife a hug, she'd come out to watch the finish. It's always elating when she does that, so I took off and pulled my fastest lap of the race and came into the finish happy as larry! I'd exceeded my expectations for the event and couldn't be happier with how I went! :)
Here is Al's version of events...
The crew:
| Jason | Giant Trance |
| Dan | Turner Flux |
| Al | Giant Anthem |
| Simon | Cherry Bomb |
| Neil | Cdale Scapel |
| Mark | Avanti HT |
| Nic | GT Ricochet HT |
The Stats:
| Last Year | This Year | |
| Result | 36th of 103 (34%) | 13th of 82 (15%) |
| Distance | 128km | 154km |
| Time | 8:26 | 8:35 |
| Climb | 1815vm | 1985vm |
| Pace | 15.1km/h | 17.9km/h |
| Date | 06/08/06 | 05/08/07 |