Nick Williamson and I traveled down for this event on Saturday in glorious sunshine in his van (converted for that racer about town). Nick had ambitions to do well in the event, organised by High Terrain Events, whereas I was just hoping to compete, having had a mini breakdown during the week with my calf. In the end my calves were fine, just the rest of me that struggled!
We arrived at Whinlatter Forest Park on Saturday lunchtime and spent the rest of day pottering around on the some of the tops doing a bit of navigating (as Nick will be doing his final Mountain Leader’s exam this weekend) and then we tried to get some riding on the trails to try them out, but didn’t mange much as Nick had some problems with the resin setting in his tubeless tyres (I went old school, with tubes). We hunkered down in the van that night in preparation for an early start.
We kicked off at 9am with 50 solo and 11 team competitors in total. The favourite looked (and so it proved) to be GBR international XTERRA triathlon athlete James Walker. The XTERRA race series is the best-known series of off-road triathlons, and is considered by most to be the de facto world championship of the sport. Run 1 was a testing 5.5 mile run up to the summit of Grisedale Pike, along the Sleet How Ridge, before descending through forest and back to transition. Nick was lying 3rd at this point and I was 14th. All good.
http://media.wix.com/ugd/9c535f_3edf4bc98a4d47f5bada82a87bcc20a6.pdf
The bike section had been altered from the advertised red and blue trails to both red trails (in fact the the red graded ‘Altura Trail’ of flowing, mountain singletrack) due to logging and I was crying inside at this news. However, I only lost perhaps 4 places on the bike although my cack-handed scrambling down some of the technical sections is screaming out for improvement. Again, Nick did very well and was 2nd at the end of the bike leg. http://media.wix.com/ugd/9c535f_519a31c0e63244468108c8012d9b1458.pdf
The second run was my undoing. I had been wearing a Camelbak on the bike and had taken on a couple of gels but clearly it wasn’t enough and I started to struggle climbing the summits of Seat How, Lord’s Seat and Barf and by the time I was on the last couple of miles I was swaying like a ship’s cat. I managed to grab another runner who gave me some jelly babies and an energy bar and I wolfed them down which allowed me to stagger home, although I was 41st on the second run which clearly was very poor and put me down at 26th in the overall finish places, in 3 hours 44 mins. Nick had a solid run but just shipped a place to finish 3rd overall in a great time of 2 hours 52 mins, ust a minute outside James Walker, who set a new course record.
Lessons learned for me? Work on my endurance – is Stuc less than a fortnight away? Gulp. And take food with me always. I’m still new to competitive mountain biking and it never fails to surprise me how much it takes out of you, whether it’s the intense concentration of the downs, or the hard climbing of the thousands of feet of ups. Testing.
A must do event if you want a tough duathlon in a great setting. I’ll definitely be back next year.
Results here: http://www.highterrainevents.co.uk/#!whinlatter-xtreme/c1rt1
Mike Lynch