Facing the challenge for the final time... this year

It was 6am and I crawled feebly into my tent, exhausted. There were still two hours until sunrise and five more until the 2017 Strathpuffer 24-hour mountain bike race in Contin was finished – but for me the race was over.

At that moment I was done and I knew I would never be back to ride it again; it had proved too much to handle and on the last lap my body had started to shut down quite dramatically due to cold and fatigue.

On my penultimate lap I stopped to lend my tyre pump to a fellow rider who had a puncture and as I sat slumped against a tree waiting for him to make the repair I started to doze off.

Although the temperature had dipped as low as -7°C, it hadn’t bothered me much until 5am when I started to shiver.

I knew I could do no more and I needed to get into my sleeping bag – if I continued it was likely that I would get into serious trouble and possibly hurt myself.

I always knew my initial target of 20 laps of the demanding six and a half mile circuit was ambitious, but on paper 130 miles didn’t seem too daunting.

However, factoring in sub-zero conditions, four miles of technical single-track, fatigue and 1,000 feet of climbing on each lap it becomes more of a challenge, not forgetting that 17 hours of that riding is done in darkness.

Despite this, when I came up six laps short of my target I was extremely disappointed.

I felt like I had let myself and others down. Perhaps exhaustion was dictating my emotions. It took the last of my remaining strength to crawl out of my sleeping bag at 8am and face my mechanic who had supported me all night with food and chipped blocks of ice off my frozen gears.

He was frying bacon as I approached and his jubilant smile took me by surprise. He had been up all night too offering support to me and plenty of other riders, and he grabbed my hand, shaking it vigorously.

He was having none of my wallowing self-pity and quite rightly told me how lucky I was to be able to participate in such an event and to just train harder if I wanted to do better next time.

Chastened, I poured myself a mug of tea and started asking others how they had done. Not surprisingly, everyone had found it tough. One friend had been taken to the medical tent suffering from mild hypothermia, and everyone had tales of their own battles that night.

Some asked if I had seen the meteorite that had lit up the night sky at 4am (I had, but had almost put that down to hallucinations); others asked if I had seen the Northern Lights (I hadn’t).

It was clear that what had occurred over the last 24 hours had been special.

It can be hard to describe the emotions involved in taking part in such an event but there is a shared understanding of what it means to push yourself to the limit and live to tell the tale. In 2014 I completed my first Strathpuffer as part of a team of four.

I said then I would never be back again but have appeared at the start line every year since. This year was going to be my final “hurrah” but by the time we were driving back down the A9 on January 22 I was already making plans on where I went wrong and what I could do to make it better in 2018.

Join the Blazing Saddles Strava Club at: www.strava.com/clubs/ BlazingSaddlesWeekendCourier

Scot riding through the mist on the bottom section of the course around 4pm.