The Angry Doctor results are in. It was one long, hot ride. The 100km took me 8 hours, 34 minutes. This includes about 40 minutes of stop time at various rest points… and a lot of walking up hills from the 70km mark onwards. So, perhaps a little more training was required!
For the first three quarters of the race, I kind of had a running commentary going, thinking to myself about the experience of riding so long, and what was good about it. But the last 20kms or so are a bit of a blank. I know the last 20kms took me about 1:45… in my memory I can recall about 5 minutes of it. I was a little tired by then.
For purposes of comparison, the winners did it in about 4:40. My bro-in-law, who had a couple of 100km races under his belt already, did it in just over 7 hours, putting him in the top half of the field. I was in the last quarter.
And yet… it was hard, gruelling, strenuous, and I cramped muscles in places I didn’t know that I could cramp, (the middle of your back, anybody?), but it was still fun, in some strange sense of the word.
What wasn’t fun was running over a couple of snakes. The first was, I think, a Death Adder, that just kind of shrugged and went ‘hmpph!’, but the second was a big, dark, long thing, that reared up off the trail… but I was flying downhill and was gone. Scared the life out of me.
Sadly – you might have seen it in the news – one of the guys competing in the 50km collapsed and died during the event. He was a fit guy, and was riding with his son.
Vital stats:
50km split: 3:37
Total for 100km: 8:34 (although this includes the 25mins I took for lunch and mechanical stuff at the 50km stop)
An average speed of just under 12km/h. Something to improve on!
Filed under: Bike, experiences, madness , 100km Mountain Bike race, Angry Doctor, mountain biking
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