Bristol Bikefest

On Saturday morning our Torq team headed off to Bristol for the Bristol Bikefest in hope of another Team victory to add to the set of results this year.

After signing on we discussed who should take up the run on the ritual le mans type running start. My Brother, Anthony, decided to take the challenge up and make sure we got a good start to our first team event of the year.

After a good running start we were into the top 20 as Anthony headed off into the woods to face some very bumpy and rocky singletrack.

By the end of his lap he crossed the line in 3^rd position overall, behind our Torq pair rider James lister, and speeding into the transition area to pass the next lap over to myself to nail for one solid 22minute lap.

The lap consisted of a few short steep climbs that gave a nasty sting into the legs and the rest offering lots of flowing gravel singletrack before heading back into a strong headwind before entering the arena.

After nailing myself to keep our great position we managed to move up and come into the arena with our other pair rider James Gleave on my wheel to come in 1^st overall and 1^st in our Mixed team consisting of myself, Matt Hart, Anthony and Lydia Gould

About 7 hours into the 12Hour race we were about 11-12mins up on our closest rival and a lap up back to 3^rd position. However as the saying goes, it’s never over until the fat lady sings, we hit disaster as one of our members faced a destructive mechanical forcing him to run the rest of the lap loosing our time advantage and position to fall back into 2^nd place but still managing to do really well limiting the huge time deficit we could have gone to as he ran flat out into the transition area with his bike on his shoulder.

Realising what happened and what was at stake I exited the arena blitzing into the singletrack chasing down our rivals only to find them a quarter of the way round. The gears dropped and I sprinted as hard as I could to chase him down only to catch him on the 1^st fire road climb. However as I was approaching I decided to keep the pressure on and go straight past him keeping the pace high so he wouldn’t be able to jump on my wheel. Luckily it worked and we took the lead once again only to come through the arena with 20 to 30 seconds now only keeping us in the lead.

As we rotated our turns between us we pushed ourselves harder and faster than we did in previous laps, draining our body and keeping us into the 22 minute a lap region making sure we opened up a significant gap incase anything happened again.

After a painful number of laps and coming into the final hour of the race we had no idea how far we were in front apart from a few hours previously where we were told that the gap was 5minutes.

The updated result we attained from one of our team members was that we were 2 minutes up in the last hour, only to mishear that we were actually 2 minutes off catching 2^nd place to take a lap up. This made us push harder once again to try and take that lap but our time ran out at the end to be just under a minute off taking the lap and giving us the 12Hour Mixed team Bikefest title.