Had a really fun race! We lost a man from our team so moved into the very competitive male pairs class, and neither of us have the XC race fitness to come close to podiuming. My tactic was to blast out fast on the first lap, as I can go pretty quick for about ten minutes, which worked beautifully, right up until ‘Badger’s Plunge’ when a flint slashed open my rear tyre and I spent 12 minutes fighting with anchovies and goo getting it to reseal. That put me right back with the slower riders so I spent the rest of the lap fighting my way through traffic, which cost me even more time but I had fun overtaking both up and downhill. My teammate managed a surprisingly fast first lap and turned up at the changeover point whilst I was just running back from using the facilities but despite that organisational fail we started working our way back up the table (we were 60th at the end of lap 1).
My lack of XC fitness started telling halfway through my third lap when cramp reared its ugly head (I could have done with a granny ring for once!) so I spent the rest of the race doing pain management (lower back from pedalling sitting down vs cramp from standing and stomping – usually my preferred approach). So that was the bad bits – the mechanical and the nasty pains. The good bits totally overwhelmed them though. This is my local stomping ground, I’m fairly quick on the downhill bits, my tyre choice was pretty effective and I was feeling in the zone. I actually rode some of the downhills substantially faster than at last year’s bone dry Big Dog! And fortunately no-one seemed to have a problem with my shouts of “coming through fast” and much of the time I managed to overtake cleanly. Totally lost the back end through ‘Into The Jungle’, the boggy heavily foliaged bit near the end of the lap, and was reovertaken by a Klein retrobike but that was my only off. Had a satisfying moment when I heard a “leader” shout at the top of A&E (the rutted swoopy descent up near the top of Stanmer) and then didn’t see so-called leader until I was well back onto the fireroad climb. I think that was when I set the fastest Strava time of the day on that segment, there was no way anyone, leader or not, was catching me down there!
So apart from the leg cramp and back spasms hurting a bit, it wasn’t as tough as I was expecting – last year was too hot for me really. And I loved the conditions, there was way more grip on offer than most riders realised, and I know the best line choices so I could really push the limits on the descents. One small bug – I think the chicken run was a lot quicker than the bombhole but I rode the bombhole each time because it’s more fun! By the end of the race we Phoenix Knights had worked our way back up to 28th and it looks like we’d have been in the top 20 if we hadn’t lost all that time with the puncture and then getting stuck working through traffic, so we’re pretty damned pleased! And after the ignominy of placing much lower than I expect in my first gravity enduro race I realise I’m pretty fast when I know a trail and am not against DH racers and suchlike! I ache rather a lot today…
The whole event seemed to run really smoothly and the marshalls and so on did a great job. The course marking was excellent this year, no moments of confusion on my part. I’ve been to every Big Dog, onederdog in 2009 (my lap took over an hour and I was scared witless much of the time, I’d only just started riding MTBs for the first time since the early ’90s and it’s a pretty techy course for an XC race), marshalling and onederdog in 2010, team in 2011, pair in 2012, and I swear it gets better every year! Didn’t actually get to say hello to any STWers but I realise I must have known fifty odd riders yesterday with it being my local race. If you saw an orange Cotic Soul with a rider in a fluoro yellow helmet, that was me!
