Cruising up to Rheola on Friday night looked promising. The weather had been good there all week and it wasn’t raining yet. However, waking up in the early hours of the morning we saw that it had rained overnight and to put it nicely... it didn’t look like it was going to stop in a hurry.
I got up and walked the course with Dad, teammate Lee and Paul Burf. It wasn’t raining currently but the sky was pretty menacing. The course was pretty much the same as I have raced before; Just a couple of differences. For example the so-called “Starwars” section was missing a massive tree stump. This opened up the line and made it pretty easy. I must say I missed the challenge.
-Rich preparing Lee's bike
-Paul's new prototype K9 
-Tom Wheeler's Pimped out and race ready Mojo Orange
Practise on Saturday was from around 8am to 2pm. Then we had qualifying. I only did 4 runs before my qualifying run but it seemed to be enough to get all my lines sorted. It was constantly drizzling the whole day and that combined with speeds around 35mph it made it unbelievably hard to see though my goggles. My last run I tried without goggles and proved to be better.
My qualifying run was really good until I came off in the bottom section jumping over to the other side of the course and over a stump. As I landed I washed out and slide on my face and knees some 20ft down the course. I stopped off at the side of the course for a good 50 seconds. After I had gathered my thoughts I cruised down to the bottom with bent bars and a twisted seat post. I came down with obviously a shocker of a time about a minute off the fastest time. After someone said I went to see the medics about my knees. I had a few deep cuts on my left knee and just grazed my right. Thanks to extreme medics for cleaning me up!
-The uplift que
-Washing my bike in the bushes
Later that night I hobbled down with Dad to the camp site that Lee, Rich, Paul and Matt was staying at. After a chat it was back to the van to catch up on sleep. During the night it really rained hard! It’s never a nice feeling waking up to that thinking, “I have to ride in that in a few hours”.
I woke up and looked out the door to a few patches of blue sky! Everything was very wet from overnight though. I left it quite late before I went down as the weather looked like it was going to stay good. I saw some people who had already had a run and they were covered in mud; the trousers were on straight away.
My first run down was good. I used my goggles and it was bearable. My second run however wasn’t as appealing. I came off in the same place as I did in my seeding run and ruined my knees into the ground again! I was far from happy and went back to the van to rest my bleeding knees once again. 
I got ready for my first race run; putting my knee and shin pads on again... most uncomfortable! I went up thinking to myself that I don’t want to come off again and I was going to take it easy. I came down with a good run behind me but at cruising pace. I was on a 3 min 24 sec’s. This put me in 2nd place behind good friend Sion Whitecross.
The course was really drying up now and the top section of rocks was totally dry. I went up for 2nd runs thinking I will go a little faster but very within my ability as I still didn’t want to fall off again. I had a good run and went into the hotspot with a 3min 20. Sion was next to come down and got also a 3 min 20. He was less than 0.1 of a second ahead of me; gutted yet happy for his first win! So I ended up 2nd, with Rob Williams in 3rd 3 seconds behind Sion and myself. I also found out that I was 7th out of around 300 people overall.
-the hardtail catagory (of course Lee is on the top!*DMR*)
the girls catagory... Whay!
-my catagory...junior
-the expert catagory
-the elite catagory
I am hoping that my knees will heal well during the week as it is up to north Wales for the final of the Cearsws cup next weekend. Here's a couple of weitrd buildings from Rheola to finish...
Thanks to DMR, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, Mojo, Mace, Nike 6, Twenty26, Funn and Geax.
0 comments:
Post a Comment