How the Strathpuffer went for us.

Baz as usual drew the short straw and did the first lap, which is always the toughest, especially this year as a lot of the track still had quite deep soft snow on it. There was the traditional Strathpuffer Le Mans style sprint start to the bikes though Baz's sprint looked more of an amble as our plan was to take it easy and see how things went. When he came in after the first lap he advised me to go on his bike with the ice tyres but halfway round I was regretting this as I narrowly avoided going over the bars on one of the rocky sections. I did the next 3 laps on my trusty Trek and , much to Baz's disgust, notched up the 2 fastest lap times! Darkness seemed to arrive before we knew it and things began to get more difficult as the wee sma' hours approached, what with trying to change clothes in the car and the fact that we weren't really eating enough, (there wasn't enough time), so we eventually called a halt about 3 am.

We felt pretty low at this point but after an attempt at sleeping for about an hour and a half or so we wandered down to the event marquee where there was food available at all times and reinforced with some food and a cup of tea containing a shovelful of sugar I did another lap and felt quite good again. By this time my bike was playing up with chain suck so I had to use Baz's Trance with the ice tyres, which really came into their own as the track had now become very icy. We kept going for near enough the 24 hours and maybe could have squeezed in another lap but by this time we were both pretty knackered and called it quits.

Baz ended up doing 8 laps and I managed 7 (with the 2 fastest ones !!!!).

Don't think I'll do it again, too much organisation really needed to do it properly, but it was a fantastic experience and something I'm glad I've managed to do.