Walkerville Classic

Sunday 17 July was really cold, with icy winds blowing through everything… it was especially cold if you were dressed in cycling clothes, waiting for a race to begin, with a little bit of spandex to keep you warm! And this is what I was doing, anxiously waiting for my second mountain bike race ever, for which I was terribly unprepared! It’s a long story, but somehow I had managed to avoid cycling for nearly 2 months, and now I was about to face 30km… 30km of dust, single track, rocks, uphill, uphill, and more uphill…

To cut a long story short, I’ll highlight some of the more interesting bits… first of all, not 5km into the race, about 100 of the 30km’ers got lost. We went up a hill, were faced with a barbed wire fence, and like lemmings, either climbed through the hole big enough for rider and bike, or threw bikes and all over the fence. This added about 5km to the race, and left a whole lot of the more serious riders frustrated, because once we had turned back, they were now at the back of the pack! J The rest of the race was pretty uneventful, except for those killer hills, one after the other, they just would not stop… and then, down a particularly rocky patch, my seat came loose! So I throw down the camelbak, haul out my tool (thank goodness I bought my own), and try to get the skyward pointing seat to a more accommodating angle… about half an hour passed before someone stopped to help me out… and by this time I had managed to get the entire seat dislodged from the seat post, in about 4 pieces in my hands. Not to mention the little farm kids, some around the age of 3 or 4, who were determined to touch up on their English, by picking up my stuff, inspecting it, prodding it, and as I found out with alarm, putting it in their mouths! So I had one eye on the bike falling apart in my hands, and the other on my stuff disappearing into little mouths… Just try to be patient with little kids when you’re tired, frustrated, and have to rescue the mouthpiece you will have to get your liquids out of for the rest of the race from a little dude’s mouth… Ah well… I survived that, and survived the race too, in 3hr 47min… not bad for someone so unfit! And I now have my second medal! Although the next day, I was really questioning whether it was all worth it, being seriously sore and stiff, and getting flu for the rest of the week on top of it!