Mountain Mayhem, a survivours' tale (of woe)

[guy]

There is an old military saying that goes "no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy", well the trip to Mountain Myhem kind of went in a similar fashion.

The plan was that we would aim for 20 laps in 24hrs, each rider doing 5 laps with a double night stint so we could all get about 4-5hrs sleep. Last thursday Ben, the number two rider admited that his training actually had involved going down the pub, drinking and smoking rollies instead of actually spending the last 3 months doing some exercise, Paul "hadnt really had the time" but had done some cycling with his 2 yr old son on a child seat, Steve, was Ok ( hes fit anyway and does loads of cycling and er, golf). I'd started to get a bit concerned, had I done enough running, road cycling, pilates stuff, stretching, off road etc.?

Well, after friday night of setting up the team HQ at Eastnor castle deer park and getting the massive Spag Bol and salad dinner with wine and beer out of the way, saturday started in earnest with the 9:00am course recce. the first half of the course was fun: out of the start/finish arena, round a lake, up a grass slope with a couple of switchbacks, climbing on fire roads to the start of the forest section ( and the DJ...) and a mile or so of fun ST, then a couple of miles of flat then climb then DH on grass back towards the arena. Well, thats 4miles of easy fun route. Then there was a water crossing ( 2m drop down, 3m wide, shallow stream and a climb out) which I was sure would look pretty horrible after a few hours of racing. Then its a climb through the campsite and the real bit of the course begins: from Buffera bridge on to The Kenda Climb...the main chunk of climbing on the cours, about 1.5 miles and 200m of climb on GRASS! ooh joy, and its been raining too. Paul bugged out here and took his bike to be fettled by Shimano (any excuse for free kit). At the top of this climb, Ben looked a bit Ill: red faced, puffing hard, tears in his eyes...he'd pushed his bike most of the way, Steve and I exchanged concerned looks: we hadnt noticed he was having problems as we'd been climbing ahead, chatting and enjoying the view. Then the real fun began...for the next 2.5 miles the course had been cut through bracken in a sequence of up and down, zig zag swichbacks and off camber straights, all muddy, no grip and challenging, then after another climb going into a muddy, rooty forest, then another climb through bracken ( no grip again) to the highest point of the course to a fun(at the time) single and double track, slightly muddy, zig zag forest trail back down to the campsite and the arena. In all 8.6 miles and 350m of climb.

At the finish of the recce Ben looked really concerned whilst I, in my motivated gung-ho state, merely felt that the double stints might have to go and we'd be looking at 16-18 laps as a do-able ammount

So, mud tyres were obviously the order of the day so the Trailrakers were fitted and the bike given its final prep. A big plate of pasta eaten back at the tent and I finally bought some decent energy/electrolytic drink (Torq lemon: its ace I can highly recommend it)

At start the guys from Singletrack were passing around a big bottle of Beer on the startline, I decide not to ask for a swig of dutch courage. The Mountain Mayhem start is a big group run of half a mile or so from the Start line archway across the course around the lake back to the arena, I try to remember where I left the bike on the finish straight along with the 800 or so others, get on the bike and join 800 people all trying to cycle up a grass hill and go round the three tight switchbacks.

My view was to go at my own pace so I did. I Got OVERTAKEN by some bloke on a unicycle so I up my pace a bit ( and burned him off... ) and cycled on for the next few miles in a long, big train of people to the water crossing where a large number of people were falling in and getting cheered by the crowds who had gathered there. The big hill was dispatched and the bracken sections allowed me to display mud riding skills gained in Tilgate and Whiteways, I stared to overtake some people ( still getting fast riders going past though) and get, if not cocky, then at least a bit more confident. Down the muddy last decent into the arena and hand over to Ben, having done a 1hr17min lap including the run and all the stops and starts of a mass group ride. No bad but not great as one of the pro riders does a 36min lap and laps me...oh I dream of being that fit.

Ben crashed on his first lap having been clipped by a faster rider and pitched down a slope. came back pretty distraught, talks about giving up there and then. Over cups of tea and food we persuade him not to but he wont do the night riding. Steve is next out and does a 1hr, 03 lap and comes back with a big grin on his face, obviously enjoying himself and says the course is drying out. Paul goes out and does a 1hr 07 and I'm back out and put the hammer down to try and beat Steves time.

Halfway round I pass Anna, aka Dirt Diva, and yell Hi but I dont know if she notices me ( Hi again Anna if you're reading this, hope you did ok), Up the hill, through the bracken section, tear through the now dry singletrack forest descent and I get back to the start finish in... 1hr, 03 mins and wonder how I can ever go faster than Steve.

Ben goes out and laps in 1:17 and gets back feeling better but says hes done for the day and its now pretty much night anayway. Steve, Paul and I do our night laps, My night lap is q. long at 1hr15m as I push the bike up some of the main hill and have a chat with Jenn Hopkins (also pushing her bike up the hill but shes done 10 laps at that point...) who is doing the singlespeed solo race ( and, I think, winning it) and say thanks for all the work she did on my bike at Quest earlier this month. At the top forest section you can hear Screech Owls (spooky) the occasional grinding of gears and the far off noise of the DJ on the other side of the course.

I finish my lap at about 1:30am and find that Steve is not at the changeover (he had threatened to go and get some sleep) point and one of our laps hasnt registered so we are down at 8 instead of 9, hmmm. Demoralised I returned to the tents to find all the lights out so I go scoff some more food, shower and go to bed for three hours. It starts raining at 2:00am...

5:15am and I get up very loudly so I wake Paul in the next tent, prep the bike, scoff some more banannas, notice that the rain seems to have eased and get out and do my 4th lap of the race...the course now is a mist shrouded quagmire. the upper section has been renamed the Somme and some of the competitors are packing and leaving. Paul is waiting to take over at 7:30, I go back and get 45mins of sleep, Steve goes out at 9:00 and I do the final lap at 10:45.

The final lap is really muddy, I mean not just a bit gloopy but the singlespeeds are clogging up, £3000 carbon race bikes are dying, new XTR and X0 mechs are being torn off, chains and broken and riders are pushing bikes downhills as well as up. The people who insisted on using semi slicks are all look semi sick :-) and the weight weenies' 22lbs bikes now have 40lbs of mud and bracken as ballast. 2.1 tyres now look like massive rings of heavy, cloying, gloopy mud

The final decent is a riot. I loved it. My narrow mud tyres dont clog as much as other people, my Marin seems to have loads of mud clearance in comparison to other bikes ( british design you see) and though the drivetrain seems to have dissapeared under the gloop I still seem to have both gears and brakes. I find I can use the deep tyre grooves in the mud and rail through the corners. I start overtaking people again, I dont fall off ( well, thinking back I did actually but not badly) but do do some tree hugging on the more challenging cornersand get back into the arena in a group of 4 or 5 similar bike/mud monsters all laughing manically.

I go back to the tent and find that the guys have started to pack so i get cleaned up and go with them to see the finish of the race at 2:00pm and collect our medals

So at the flag we did 13 laps, I did 5 and didnt get cramped up (which was one of my problems at the D2D) I feel ok today (monday) actually so I guess the moderate amount of training I did helped. I havent looked at the bike yet but I fear for my brake pads and 3-week old drivetrain. As a team its obvious we are not a well oiled machine but we did go to the MM for fun and that is what we had. Next time we will (probably) train harder, Ben might even train a bit...

I am still totally wired from having drunk about 10 liters of energy drink, energy bars, loads of friut, pasta, burgers, scrambled eggs, bacon butties..., tea, coffee, red bull in a 24 hr period but I slept like a log last night for a good 9 hours and will probably do the same for the next few days as I have some time off work to recover.

As an experience it really has to be done at least once for a dyed in the wool mountain biker, if only to see just how fast and fit the pro guys are in comparison to us mere mortals...

Someone did a 31minute lap...

Blimey!

[Neil]

Sounds like an incredible experience - I kept seeing the signs for MM and the team vans etc. but I was on the tarmac instead.

From Brecon to Ledbury on Friday evening, then from Ledbury to Staunton to Tewkesbury to Evesham to Pershore to Malvern and back to Lebdury, followed by Sunday morning back to Brecon via Hereford (180 miles in total)

It was good to see all the muddy rigs on the back of cars travelling back on Sunday with exhausted people inside.

Well done for surviving it!

[guy]

Well 180 miles aint bad for a weekend on a bike...what am I saying, that a rocking amount! I had a look at the results for the MM this morning and found out that a bunch of the solo riders had gone over the 22 lap mark...thats about 190miles off-road in 24hrs, the 4-man pro team that won did 33laps, 283 miles and over 11,000m of climbing (higher than Everest) in all which puts my five race laps and one recce, and the teams' 13 laps and 111miles into stark contrast.

I worked out that I had done the equivalent of climbing up Mt Snowdon twice... I really want to try that climb for real so next time I'm up in north wales...

One of the two unicycle teams did 15 laps, now thats impressive. seeing a unicyclist tackle a singletrack climb is something to behold

[JimKirk]

born again hard Guy, well done!

[Bunnyflop]

What an excellent experience, thanks for sharing that with us Guy, really inspiring.... got any photos btw ? Unicycle the course are they mad ! I once tried to have a go on one with a person holding up each armpit and the attempt was disaster coupled with me nearly peeing my pants through laughin, so all those laps on one is just pure amazing. Anyway, who's up for MM next year ? Maybe we should do a Muddy@rse Team (especially if we have our jerseys sorted by then ) ....

[DirtDiva]

You couldn't have had a better named team than "Muddy@rse" this year!

For some unknown reason, my team decided to do double laps from the get-go. My first double started around 7.00pm and finished just after 9.30pm. The second started around 5.00am, didn't finish until after 9.00am and contained both the two slowest laps for my team.

The first lap was okay. I made it all the way up the Kenda climb (if that's where you passed me Guy, there's no way I would have noticed you - too busy telling myself to keep breathing and not puke...) and only got off and pushed for a tiny bit on the fire-road climb just after that (had forgotten about it and was in the wrong gear).

The second lap was really fun. I guess having done it twice by then (did a recce on the Friday afternoon whilst demo-ing an Intense 5.5 and a Bionicon Edison - told the guys in the Singletrack tent to book me something small and bouncy and that's what they came up with - good fun ) had me feeling pretty confident and the course was at its best about then too. I did push a bit of the Kenda Climb and the one after it (SRAM Ascent?) because I was feeling a bit lazy, but so what. The final descent was way fun and I was just buzzing when I got off the bike.

It was raining by the time I went out again (and had been solidly for the last couple of hours), but also starting to get decently light, so I only needed my lights in the forest on the first half. That first part up to the water splash was fine, but the moment things started turning uphill after that, it seemed as though I had left my legs in my tent. I got off and pushed up all the significant climbs, but although I wasn't exactly turning big gears, I did ride most of the rest (or at least try to - got quite good at the "sit on your bike and push along the top of a rut with one foot" technique).

When I got back to the tent (we were camped alongside the course not far from the start - Hecklers' Corner, for those that know MM) I had a bit of a bathroom/food break and spent a good five or ten minutes talking myself into going out again. I really didn't want to, but I knew that if I did it then, I definitely wouldn't have to go out again. It seemed better just to get it over with. It was an awful lap though. Again, after the water splash everything got hard. Once I got to the Kenda Climb I just got off and started trudging. Slowly. Very Slowly. I went and used the bushes as much because it meant I could stop for a minute as because I needed a wee. Those few minutes respite were probably the highlight of the lap. By the time I reached the bracken I had pretty much lost the will to live. Well, not quite, but certainly the will to even try and pedal. Came across a few "elite walkers" on the ascents, which made me feel slightly better. Had a chat with Jenn Hopkins about how much each of us would give for a nice hot bath on the uphill push to the obelisk. Felt guilty for being so pathetic as she would have been on her 15th or 16th lap by then and I was on my 4th and my team's 13th (in the end we did 16, which might well have been 17 if one of the team hadn't had a massive light failure a short way around the course). Crashed twice in about five metres on the final descent. Nothing painful - the mud was too thick and soft - just comedy slides. Finally made it back to the tent and told the next team member that it was hideous out there and no way, no how was I doing another lap. Stuffed a bunch of food in my mouth and then went and had what has to rank as one of the top ten showers of my life. Opened a beer.

And you know what? I'd do it all again.

P.S. Photos. Clicky clicky.

[JimKirk]

sounds like you both had epic weekends! I'd be well up for a team or two from here next year! if anything comes of it, count me in!

nice pics DD - it looks like you could hide a submarine in that puddle!

[DirtDiva]

Yeah, it poured for a few hours on Sunday night. The photos don't really show how fast the water was moving through there either.

[guy]

Guys Mountain Mayhem Pics

dunno if the above will do the clicky linky thingy but here goes...

Hi Anna, I passed you (I think) on the bit of singletrack going down to the Adidas Evil Eye viewpoint on the first half of my second lap at about 7-7:30pm (might be wrong though, its all abit of a blur...). Well done for doing double stints, I considered doing this on my night stint but the temptation of a hot shower and my sleeping bag for a couple of hours was too much for me. Well, that and hearing the rain start at 2:00am

My only regrets were not having my helmet cam on for at least one lap but I decided to make some concesions to lightening my bike and pack for the race and not stopping and taking some photos at the top of the course as people who weren't there only have our tall stories of epic quagmire to go on ( it really was that bad...)

Not even thinking about next year yet, give me a couple of days to get over the shock ( but I agree with Anna, it was brilliant)

[guy]

er, right, that link above should work now...

Just should also mention that Pauls' bike had a catastrophic mechanical as he rode back to the tent after finishing his night lap...clogged muddy mech into the rear wheel and bang! six broken spokes. Still, it could have been worse... it could have happened at the start of his lap...

[DirtDiva]

Yikes! Somehow everything kept working on my bike. My brakes were a bit mushy by the end of it, but all they needed was a bit of pad adjustment.

[guy]

I saw someone exit the water splash, start putting the power on and destroy their spangly Sram XO mech: totally snapped in two...so only 4.3 miles back to the finish line, poor blighter.

Dirt Diva, If you look at Joolze Dymonds' website:

Joolze Dymond Photos

you might be able to find if she took a pic of you in action on the course, unfortunately she managed to get a really good pic of me fluffing my bike skills near the DJ area during my night stint... Some ace photos on this site, just gotta get my paypall account up and running and I'm gonna buy some pics.

[Ollie]

Guy and DirtDiva, I've pasted your stories into the Holiday and Events section of the blog, hope this is OK with you.

Let me know if not... sussexma [at] btinternet [dot] com

Thanks...might look into doing this next year

[guy]

oh and I just found this on STW...me doing the knee-out speedway stylee action racer thang

man of action

I look almost like I am actually good at this racing lark...

[Bunnyflop]

excellent photo, very professional ...

[guy]

Yup, V. professional pic,just a shame about the subject matter...

comment from my wife: "that make you look like you have grown a moustache..."