After my son was run over by a car last week (he's OK no permanent damage, luckily), and having spent the last 7 nights sleeping on hospital Z-beds, I nearly pulled out of this one.
Fortunately, my friend Dawn said she'd enter with me as a pair (at a supposed more leisurely pace! yeah right Dawn!), so with many text messages from me at the sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh to my friends in the Borders (who had Internet access) my entry was changed to a pair.
I was feeling very tired. 4-6 hours of broken sleep is not enough for me. I had not been on a bike in over a week, and seemed to have gained some weight while staying in hospital.
I also had forgotten about my broken chain from the last event, so i didn't have full use of my gears.
Again, we got the map prior to the start, There was one route that seemed obvious to me regardless of the value of the points. Once we got the points sheet, we were off, again I forgot to start my stop-watch.
All was going well, with only a couple of wrong turns, (and a near head-on collision with a fellow cyclist by Dawn), until we decided to leave our bikes, and run up a steep hill to get to a point. On the way back down, i twisted my ankle. I managed to run it off, but it could have so easily been game over.
With 1 hour to go, we were about as far away from the finish line as possible A strong tail wind had been kind to us all day, until we had to head back in the direction we had came from. This wouldn't have been a problem under normal circumstances, but i was dead beat, and had nothing left.
To make matters worse, the most direct route was out of bounds, so we had to re-trace our earlier route.
The time seemed to fly past, and our pace slowed even more as we reached the 3hr mark.
Arriving almost 27 min.s late cost us 195 points, taking our total from 240 to 45, and giving us a position in the mixed team event of 8/8
There seems to have been some errors in the final scores, which have now been corrected. This did not affect Dawn and I.
My friends Keith and Lynne again secured 2nd place with a score of 315. Toni was joined by Walter for this event to finish 3rd behind Keith and Lynne with 304 points.
Final results can be found here
Next event, 24hrs of Exposure 7th May 2011
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