I wrote this a good while back, for Richie Byrne's 'test pilot' thing, but as I've currently nothing better to do I thought I may as well stick it up here as well to give you's something to look at. It's a bit shorter than the rest you'll be glad! -
Race prep started the day before, with a ‘leisurely spin’ round the track with one of Dromara’s top pro XC racers and nice guys: Phil O’neill. I say ‘leisurely spin’ as after taking a mad brainwave to go for an hours run the day before, my legs were a bit dead and screaming out for some elevation and sleep but yet I found myself sideways in the wet around the track at the top end of my wee heart’s capacity! At this stage the track wasn’t marked out so a bit of local knowledge was invaluable (realised this as I tried to do a couple of laps on my own after Phil left and ended up lost for 40mins) cheers Phil.
Getting my laps in the day before meant I didn’t have to get all dirty on Sunday morning which was a fab job. Just chilled with super pros Rob Deegan and Aaron McCann for an hour, before my inner wee girl came out and I sat in the heat of the car for half an hour to stay out of the savage wind. Scoffed some Haribo, paid a few visits to the porta-loos and worked a bit of charm for some free red-bull and before I knew it everybody else was at the line (never quite got round to warming up, bit windy..)!
Race started as usual with Holeshot King Dan Runciman gunning it from the start while I rolled along attempting the seemingly impossible task of clipping my foot into my new fancy pedals. By the time most people had got to the first corner I had just about got the feet in and realised how high a gear I’d left the bike in. Sent her on anyway trying to spin up through the gears and after a bit of dodgy passing round the first few corners was sitting tight on Rob’s rear end. Before long we got out onto the grass and Rob so kindly let me past so he could get a bit of shelter, while Aaron brought up the rear. Unfortunately for Rob as we came off the grass into the singletrack his chain slipped off the front. I waited for as long as my trackstanding skills would let me but that wasn’t very long so I headed on at a steady enough pace hoping he’d catch up and we could have a race.
In the end my steady pace ended up being a bit harder than I thought and he didn’t
catch up, so I pushed on so that he wouldn’t be able to see me on the open grassy bits as I knew if he’d something to lock his sights onto he’d soon be up with me again.
2nd lap was a bit wild as all the S4s had skidded their way through what were sort of grippy corners in the first lap. This resulted in me lamping her into them and having 2 fairly huge crashes, but luckily the ground was nice soft stuff and I missed the trees.. just slid about 10m down the track each time and had to sprint back for my bike!
Other than that there wasn’t really much excitement in the rest of it. The jumpy thing as you entered the singletrack bit at the very end almost killed me in every one of me laps, but thankfully my foxy forks are lethal and I was in good hands as I nosedived through the air about 5 foot past any sort of downslope.
All in all, had a super time, great organisation, great craic, great track. Free water tablet things at sign-on were a fine job, medals were nice(although money is cool for U16s and Juniors that are too young to work/still at school but have bikes to break every weekend) and the wind, although it was trying, didn’t manage to blow any of the porta-loos over. Cheers XMTB and all involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment