Strathpuffer suffer

Back from potentially the hardest 24 hour race in the ?world. January Scottish winter conditions. Moonless night. Technical course with 18 or so hours of darkness. It was excellent. We rode under the banner of team Singletrack Savalas. Team roster: Johnny Dangerous, Dave Macdonald, the Marquis of Darkness, and Enrico 'Jesus' Gonzales. We ripped, quite frankly, to a 7th place finish despite 20 hours of (heavy) rain, snow and hail. The course ate brake pads for breakfast: for us a set of sintered pads was lasting 2 laps. Granite grinding paste will do that. The mostly fireroad uphill gave way to a rocky and technical downhill which had exposed slabs to narrow bridges over ever filling streams with rocks like marshmallows in chocolate. Only harder. Much harder.

Our man Phil the horse, racing solo singlespeed, had an excellent start and then the reality of a stomach complaint, the battering weather and changing disc pads near every lap bit home. At the rate he was going I would have predicted a win for sure, but as is the way with 24 hour racing it is unpredictable.

There will no doubt be fuller information on Singletrack and the Strathpuffer website (see linkys to the right). Me? I'm nursing around 2 square feet of burn after a litre of coffee upturned into my lap due to stupidity and bad luck. A day in Raigmore A&E left me with a midriff of swaddling to soak up the exudate from the burns and peeing out of a hole cut into an extra from "the Mummy Returns". Ach well, its not as bad as it could have been...