Wrap up and overview including the obligatory FB expression of feelings.
- What: As many laps as you can in 24hrs of a hard, pinchy, technical and windy 14 kmish Mountain Bike course near Armidale.
- Riding Time – 21hrish on the bike, plus pit stops. Starts at 12:00pm Saturday and finishes 12:00pm Sunday. You just keep going.
- Stats: Km’s – 275kmish at 13.5km/hr. Elevation > 4750m.
- Person I cant thank enough – Tracy Yeomans as Pit Crew and essential life person you couldn’t do this shit without.
- Best part – Getting chaffing cream rubbed into my arse by Tracy every few hours plus the night riding in the forest when alone.
- Worst part – double vision lap 17/18 and blurred eyes. 1 ‘slow mo’ uphill rocky crash that hurt the joints. Never experienced this before and couldn’t see to ride, took longer to recover than had left in the race and this was poo.
- Thanks: Nick and Mick from Pixel Productions and Darren from ACT Bike Super Store for all the help leading up. Plus, everyone who sent there messages of support.
- Limits: I found them and realised my body is not as strong as my mind and quit on me. Again. We can develop our limits so to do better, we must keep going.
- Regret: I didn’t do 1 or 2 more lap’s plus getting ‘Armidale Bike store’ to adjust my bike before the race – the gears wouldn’t work on lap 1 and the wheel actually dislodged causing great stress and a time delay on the
- Next: Recover, ride again to develop my limits and tolerance.
- Hardest Part: Riding a bike with an increasingly chaffed arse and having to stop before I wanted to. I mean I wanted to, everyone one does, but I had to make the decision based on serious potential of crashing badly, that something worse was wrong and irreversible with my eyes/head – so stopping to be safe – hate how that felt.
- Lesson: It is hard to be proud of yourself when you set high standards but in reality, I have to be proud. I only started riding again recreational 1 year ago after a 10 year break due to a series of serious of reconstructive operations. I decided to do this ride in April after an elbow reconstruction. It took until only 3 months ago that I could even go riding in the mountain with two hands. I have thought for many years, I could never ride again and didn’t, then I just started in real small bits during covid and now I can pedal again. So this test seemed a solid one.
- Wake Up Call: Great challenges are awesome and everyone should test themselves, repeatedly, fail, then push their limits. It was way way way harder than when I did it in my 40’s plus people are so much faster, more experienced, more orgniased at it. You cannot expect to compete well, unless you make it the thing you do and do it for a long time. At 40 I didn’t have a protistic knee, protistic hip or any spinal reconstructions and rode all the time for fun. It wasn’t age or injury, there were people older, faster than me and everyone in it was amazing.
- Truth: I say Muay Thai is the toughest sport in the world, solo 24hr MTB is the hardest (or any equivalent ultra endurance). The men and women who did this and did it well were amazing. My mediocre performance of 5th over 50’s was humbling but I will improve and be better for Challenge.
IF a challenge isn’t risky with a high chance of failure – it isn’t a challenge.
