Ultracycling

Yeah, I checked last night, wondered why they'd both stopped in the same place and then saw the tweet about the curfews. Only a couple of km separate now.

Gap out to 6km.

Shit, he's been passed right near the finish. I hope that's a tracker update issue.

CM has finished but just is not yet finished according to tracker.

Looks like @skinny won.

1 Attachment

Nice one @skinny

Woot!

Damn that must've been close.

Tracker updated now. James by 7min!!!

Just saw that too! Excited to hear how it played out.

So with the curfew, neither skinny nor Meier were allowed to start S15 TIL 0700 so they waited the night and then had a 3hr drag race to the finish? Mad!

More or less. I left earlier as I'm slower. He caught me on the climb about 3/4 way up. I kept on the gas. We then had a push over some bad terrain to cut across. He took that shortcut also from top of 15 to 16. It was raining ans blowing up at the top. I put my wet weather gear on at the top of sector 15 but he did the push is just Jersey. I caught him at the top of s16 which is a descent getting dressed up and looking cold. I was already dressed and hit the shitty descent then got to tarmac road ans stuck it in biggest gear (30x10 !) And TTd flat out to finish.

Hes incredible strong. Speed I cant match.

Great riding well done

Looks like well thought through layering strategy , Chapeau.

Fantastic work, congratulations James.

Er oops, I not only managed to miss the fact that it's an off-road race, but also that it wasn't the first day. I saw the kilometrage and thought 'that's what skinny will happily knock out on a bad day, so he must just be finishing this session'. Multiple fails on my part.

Well done, James!

Ha, experience wins. :)

He has got 7 years as a WT pro under his belt, which probably helps with the speed.

Great effort, especially given your recent injury issues. Well done!

Well done, really impressive. Great to see experience and good decision making beating raw speed.
Sounds like putting on warm gear earlier was important? Always tempting to delay taking action in a tight spot, put off making the decision, but best to be decisive!

Yeah. Pretty unexpected to have the physical ability needed. But it's a lot mental. I am back to my best mentally for sure.

Feels good.

I think so. I am always meticulous about keeping my temperature correct. Even if it means wasting time putting gear on and off more than I wish.

Yeah its multi terrain. So most of the sectors are somewhere between nice gravel to abominable hike a bike. Then you link then up free roure, so tarmac.

Usually he's rolling over the finish with a magnum ice cream in hand no? Never seen this exaustion before 😂 well done skinny.

How do you measure or monitor that?

Experiance. My brain. My sense. A thermometer.

Laurens Ten Dam's take on Further https://www.instagram.com/p/CEP5VTZnmdV/

I can get a bit more time to do something and had a long and hard think about the two volcano sprint in Italy in October. (entries close tomorrow).

Having had a proper look, it's even harder than I had realised. The amount of climbing is crazy, 22,000m in just 1,070km, and you basically have 4 days +3 nights to do it in. I really wasn't sure if I could get round it in that time.

Would have been up for giving it a go, but we're in Germany for a family thing at the moment and I just didn't fancy doing another return flight with all the covid stuff around.

The other October option is Andi Buchs' Morocco event which sounds good, but would be two weeks. Also it has some optional sections which you can decide on when you are out there, which sounds like a flawed format, I prefer to have no choice but to keep going.

So new plan is to do UK bucket list stuff that I never get round to, must likely a September / October SR starting with hilly 600 in Wales and 200 round the lake district, but no racing.