The other weekend a few friends and I headed up to Fort William to take part in the Relentless 24 mountain bike endurance race. We chucked all our stuff into the hire van, with the intention of using it as a base during the race.
I volunteered to do the run at the start (always a sucker for a bit of additional pain), and after the first lap (~9 miles) I was about the 10th person back, but was first in the category we were in (Trios). We did a few more laps each, trying to beat each others fastest lap times and generally not treating the event seriously. Night time came (this race is a 24 hour relay) and we decided to do double laps, which was such a bad idea as it was cold and I didn’t have enough clothes. I cracked about half way round my second of the two laps, and crawled back to the start. The others on the team fared about the same, the cold was bitter and we had all just gone off too fast. We gave up and went to bed because the thought of doing any more double laps was just agony! In hindsight we should have went back to single laps at that point, but it was cold, dark and I’m just going to put it down to experience.
The morning came, we hadn’t set an alarm and it was 9am. At this point were last in our category (everyone else had continued through the night), so we worked hard for the remaining 3 hours and finished second last. At the end there were people falling over everywhere totally exhausted - it was kinda weird as I still felt fresh after only doing 7 laps and having 8 hours in bed, bit disappointing but have learned some lessons for sure. Since the race I have bought some winter clothes so won’t make the same mistake.
In general it was all really good fun, there were so many people there that I knew and the craic was awesome. The organisers were handing out ‘Relentless’ energy drink which was just mental stuff (made by Coca Cola, like red bull but in 500ml cans). One guy was sick in the changeover area, and he got a prize for it!
We smashed the rear light of the hire van by mistake, so a bit of glue and a few minutes with a hair drier sorted that out. The damage was still very obvious but the staff at the hire company didn’t notice when I took it back - bonus!