Welsh Champs at Mynydd Ddu 2008

I arrived at a reasonable half 11 at the venue and had a chat with the team and all the lads. It was about to be a longer night than I had first thought though... My Dad’s snoring... need I say more? It was bad enough that I had to wake up early to walk the course.

It was supposed to be showery on the practise day and that couldn’t be more accurate. For the whole day it was sunny for a while and then would rain for a while.

OK so let’s start with my first run; I came off 3 times! That’s the most I have ever fallen off in a run and it was my first! I had a further 6 runs however without falling off and I had tried every tyre I had with me. 2 spikes seemed to be the best combination. Despite the pretty dry day and the covered track, it was very wet and gloopy. The track was really hard! It’s really technical with greasy rocks and tons of roots. I felt like I knew the course pretty well and had done all the lines I had looked at.

To finish the riding off for the day I had my seeding run. I just cruised down the hill and got what I thought was a smooth run down. I seeded 1st place with a time of 3 min’s 22 seconds, with a second gap between me and second place. I think there was quite a time gap after that.

After some pasta and burgers and whatever else I could find to eat I walked the course with teammate Lee and mates. I didn’t really find any more lines but just confirmed the ones I was doing and saw everything in a bit more detail. When we got to the bottom Lee mentioned that he had “Illusionary Lines”, the DVD. So the laptop was straight out and we watched it before going to bed.

Whilst Dad slept in the van (scared of the bugs that could be in the tent), I had the whole easy up to myself and I couldn’t even hear him snoring. Bonus!

I let a few riders go down in the morning before I did my two runs of practise to take that top layer of mud off. It was really warm and sunny on race day and it didn’t rain overnight either. This didn’t make any difference to the course though; it just stays constantly wet there. My runs were good but a lot of people on the course meant that I had to stop and start a lot.

My first race run went well for most of the run but I did stop at the top where I hit a tree but it felt a lot faster than my seeding run. I was just over half a second ahead of 2nd place and again there was a big time gap from there on.

My second run didn’t go so well. I made a mistake at the top of the track so I pushed the rest of the course. It got to the hardest steepest and my favourite part of the track and I let the brakes
off... didn’t make the corner at the bottom and landed in a stream = very wet!

I still kept 1st place from my first run time so I was more than happy with my first win as a first year junior. Lee won the hartails so he holds the hardtail champion title for the next year. A good weekend for DMR! Here are the pictures of the podiums;

Thanks to, DMR, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, Mojo, Mace, Nike 6, Twenty26, Funn and Geax.