Dusk ’til Dawn was the first endurance race I ever entered so you might think I’d have some affection for the event. But you’d be wrong. I enjoyed our first race, back in 2005, when I had a completely inadequate bike that broke after a lap and a half, but when we came back in 2007 I thought we would do better. So when I crashed after three quarters of a lap and injured myself enough that I couldn’t carry on, I was hugely disappointed. Then in 2008 it rained, and rained, and rained, and there was nothing but misery in Norfolk. In 2009, we’d done pretty well at Mayhem, and very well at SITS. But given previous disasters I wasn’t looking forward to D2D very much at all. And when the weather forecast said there would be wild wind and heavy rain, I gave serious thought to feigning illness and pulling out. But the day came and I thought I might as well go up and see what happened. Eldrik’s horrible knee injury, sustained all the way back in April, meant he was still not cycling. So for the second year in a row, Andrew and I entered the [...]

Four months on from being ineptly tackled by a fat Brazilian, Eldrik was still on crutches. John, our very successful fourth team-mate from Mayhem, was otherwise engaged, so the call went out to see who else might fancy a place on an occasionally amateurish but always aspirational team for SITS. We soon got a reply from David Maloney, who had a string of extremely high placings to his name at endurance events. At first I thought he might not have read our ad properly and mistaken our bit about “finishing in the top third” with “finishing third”. But luckily it proved not to be the case and he felt our team was deserving of his talents. Rain / no rain As with Mayhem I obsessively checked the weather forecasts for days prior to the race. It looked like Catton was going to get an apocalyptic downpour, again – but would it be before, during or after the race? It turned up there on the Thursday evening. As we drove up from London on the Friday, it was clear, sunny and warm, and we began to dare to hope. We set up camp and headed out for a practice lap. There [...]

Eldrik had missed our last race of 2008 thanks to a broken scaphoid. It required surgery and there were warnings about possible limited mobility, but thankfully over the winter it recovered well. But then Eldrik managed to get kicked in the knee by a fat Brazilian, whose staggeringly inept tackle during a friendly football game ripped off a chunk of cartilage and put Eldrik well and truly out of action. Two months later, Mayhem was imminent, Eldrik was still on crutches, and an advert was put out seeking a new team-mate. Mayhem’s a popular event and in no time at all we had our fourth man, John Crumpton – a 24 hour novice but fearsomely keen cyclist who had once cycled in a relay from Land’s End to John O’Groats in less than three days. Weather forecasts We had done three races in 2008. Each one was preceded by a severe weather warning, and each one ended up being a muddy nightmare. After the third one, we were pretty fed up of trying to push muddy bikes along the trail faster than anyone else could, and we all fervently hoped that 2009 would give us some nicer conditions. In the [...]

Our team of four had done a great job at Sleepless In The Saddle, finishing in the top third. But Ian lives in the Lake District, and decided Norfolk was too far away to drive to for the three hours of cycling he’d get out of a 12 hour race. So, it would be Eldrik, Andrew and I trying to do a good job back at Thetford, scene of our first ever endurance race. But then, a few weeks before the race, disaster struck. Eldrik came off his bike and landed heavily on his wrist. He thought it was just sprained, but two weeks later when it was still hurting, he got it checked properly and found that he’d fractured a bone. It required an operation to fix properly, and so Andrew and I were left to take on D2D as a pair. Eldrik would still come along but definitely would not be in a fit state to ride. The weather forecast Our two previous races in 2008 had been marred by rain. Not just a few drops, but wild lashing storms which had cause the Met Office to issue severe weather warnings. All summer we’d been clinging onto the [...]

Six weeks after the muddy horrors of Mountain Mayhem, we were back on the race track, returning to Catton Park in Derbyshire for our second go at Sleepless In The Saddle. Last year we’d covered 24 laps, finishing about two thirds of the way down the field in our class. With 36 hours more competitive racing under our belts, we were hoping to do better. Stormy weather So Mayhem had been disgustingly wet and muddy. Surely SITS would be like last year – a sunny weekend in the midst of the wettest summer the UK had ever seen. Sadly, no: the forecast was similar to Mayhem – it would be deceptively sunny on the Friday, start to rain some time on Saturday, be apocalyptic during the night, and then be sunny again on Sunday. It was so deceptively sunny on Friday that I just couldn’t believe there would be rain, and this made it all the more heartbreaking when the rain arrived right on schedule, a couple of hours before the start. We listened to the rider briefing huddled under an umbrella. Eldrik got us under way at 2pm, and set a blazing pace. When he got back, he was [...]

I guess there are two clues in the name of this event. Even so, the amount of mayhem at our second 24 hour race was far greater than we could have imagined. Steve had emigrated back to Australia since our last event, so the team this time consisted of me, Andrew, Eldrik, and Ian who Eldrik and I had known at school. Before the start Our preparation for this event was better than ever before. I had not bought a bike just the day before, I’d been riding lots and I was much fitter than I had been for our previous races. And we managed to get out of London early. The journey there was enlivened only by Andrew’s constant struggles to get the van into fifth gear, and a brief confusing detour through a small town in Oxfordshire due to roadworks. At the site we drove around looking for a spot to camp, but it was already quite busy. The spot we ended up in looked far from ideal at first, seemingly miles away from any water and a long way from the start. But it only seemed like miles from the start because of the windy road we’d [...]

Two years after our first outing, we returned to the forests of Norfolk, hoping to put our SITS experience to good use and improve on our 2005 performance here. Surely, after we’d finished a 24 hour race, a 12 would be easy? Setting up In 2005, ridiculously, we’d arrived barely two hours before the start. We found ourselves camping miles from the arena, we didn’t have time to ride more than a couple of miles of the course, and basically we were terribly ill-prepared. We did much better this time, making an early start out of London and arriving at the course at a sensible time. We’d only been able to get hold of a small-ish van, and Eldrik had taken one for the team by volunteering to get the train up instead of joining me, Steve and Andrew in the van. Thanks to his efforts, we already had a great camping spot bagged by the time we arrived. We managed to pre-ride half the course this time, and it seemed infinitely better than the 2005 course. That had been fairly monotonous and flat, and was just a long circuit that went out into the forest, wound around for 11 [...]

Prologue Our first attempt at an endurance race had ended ignominiously in retirement after 70 miles, when our target had been 120. So having failed to complete a 12 hour race, obviously the logical thing to do is enter a 24 hour event and see how that goes. Working in our favour was a comprehensive upgrading of bikes and lights for all of us, and the experience of D2D which taught us to get to the venue more than two hours before the start of the race. We left London on a Friday morning in August. The team was the three of us who had done D2D, plus Steve who had cycled across Costa Rica with Eldrik the previous year. The race was in Derbyshire, and after an easy drive up there we found the venue and set up camp. An early mishap was the back of deckchair falling apart, pitching Steve unexpectedly out the back of it. A second mishap was that Eldrik had drastically over-estimated the size of his tent. If it was genuinely a two-man tent, it was for two very small men. I slept in the back of the van. Early laps Race morning saw us [...]

With the benefit of hindsight I can see this one was always going to be difficult. Eldrik had persuaded me and Andrew to do an endurance cycling event, a 12 hour night race in the forests of Norfolk, but neither of us really knew what this would involve. My brother had won a mountain bike in a competition, which I borrowed, not realising that while it was fine for cycling to work, it was totally inadequate for serious off-road cycling. But I didn’t know this beforehand, so I was quite excited when we drove up to Thetford on Saturday 17 September 2005. On arrival at the site we soon realised we should have arrived hours earlier, because we ended up camped about a mile from the course – a serious pain for doing any spectating or arranging changeovers. But we were still ready for the 8pm start, which Eldrik took on – a short run behind a quad bike to get everyone a bit spread out, and then the lap. Despite a puncture and ensuing trackside repairs, Eldrik came back from the 10.5 mile lap in a bit under an hour, and then it was Andrew’s turn. Our plan had [...]

Just a week after my last visit to Charleroi, I was back in grim South Belgium. This time I was on my way to the Netherlands, to run my first half-marathon. I thought I might as well do one somewhere reasonably flat so I was doing the CPC Loop in Den Haag. I got a train to Brussels, had an hour before the train to Den Haag and went back to one of my favourite cafes from the previous weekend for a quick coffee. The next day in Den Haag I walked into town from where I was staying, and had a look around. The start of the race was at Malieveld, and hours before the start there were already plenty of people jogging around and warming up. It was overcast and quite chilly – not good waiting around weather, but pretty much ideal for running. The start time approached, and I headed for the line. The CPC Loop is a huge event, with thousands of runners, and I found myself about three quarters of the way back down the field. The hooter went, and off we would have gone if there wasn’t a huge bottleneck for us all to [...]