Gorrick 12hr race report

Warren reports ...

Myself, David Creeggan and Steven Richards competed in Saturdays 12hr MTB race held on a new course in Minley.

In typical Gorrick manner the course was a true mountain biker's one ‘lots and lots of twisty single track and bumpy sections’ with not a lot of opportunity for us roadies to exploit our pure ‘power’ We had good intentions especially with Jamie headlining as our captain but it was not to be, so we had to make do with 3 of us, Jamie was still on hand to offer some advise being a 24hr veteran himself. The main thing was eat and drink, keep warm and keep the bike clean! This was all well and good but the deluge of rain meant we were in for a muddy 12hrs. In fairness to the course it was all rideable.

I was nominated to set us on our way and came in at the end of the first lap in 3rd place setting up Steve for his maiden lap, about 10 mins in though I received a call on my mobile, his chain had snapped! In these events you are supposed to fix any problems yourself but seeing as we all had the same numbers on our bikes I went and found him and gave him my bike to finish his lap on! Dave then set off on his lap we were down in around 8th place now in the teams race so had our work cut out especially as pretty much all other teams had 4 riders.

By the time the night set in we had clawed our way up to 4th place with not much chance of getting any higher but plenty of opportunity to slip back down. We thought we had used our bad luck but approx 1.5miles from the end of my 4th lap my derailleur wrapped itself up and I had to run to the finish. By now the average lap time was up about 10 mins longer than the daytime laps but we were all pretty consistent. I managed to get my bike into surgery and it came out hanging on and was able to give me one more lap.

All in all good fun, we were all pretty battered as we are all soft roadies and had various aches mainly in the upper body regions but was certainly worth doing and we ended the night in 4th place in the teams, again not a bad effort, with Jamie on board I reckon we could have challenged for 3rd easily.

I have learnt that I wouldn’t want to do a 24hr version and that there are some mental people around especially the ones that want to ride these things solo.

Warren Jesse