Taking my Foffa bike for a spin around the Bristol Aquarium, a music store and many more places while pulling stunts along the way. How to make cycling fun…
Music: Hugh Hardie @Hughhardiemusic Downloads at: www.soundcloud.com/hugh-hardie
Filmed & Edited: Alex Allen @Formulatemedia
Foffa bikes — bespoke classic geared and single speed bikes www.foffabikes.com @foffabikes
Oktoberfest – ©Anthony Yeates
Bristol Oktoberfest – Better than Munich…
Aaa, summer. How beautiful while it fleetingly lasts, and how sad to see it go. Still, if there’s one thing to look forward to when the nights grow shorter and the ambient temperature drops, it’s the approach of October, because when the tenth month starts, that means Oktoberfest is not far away.
The Bristol Oktoberfest is the second of two classic annual events held at Ashton Court, a stone’s throw from the mouth of the Severn – an eight hour mountain bike endurance race, there are categories for teams of four, pairs, or (for the truly masochistic) solo entries in male, female and mixed forms, with further subdivisions for single speeds and old git racers. As such, it attracts a wide variety of abilities, including the returning Team NTG MTB, back to have a second crack at the excellent single track on offer after our great (if tough!) endurance debut at June’s Bike Fest.
Instead of putting ourselves through the grinding pre-race endurance test of camping, we set some early-morning alarms and charged down the M5 first thing. An early start, to be fair, but given the fairly grim weather in the build up, it was the better choice – on arrival we were greeted by a cheerful Oktoberfest-hat-type-wearing-type who guided us to park on the access road as the camping field was having some hydration issues. Team captain Jonno stepped up to the batter’s plate first of all, taking his place for the Le Mans style running start amongst the hundreds of other riders – I held his Stanton as the galloping hordes charged back up the hill, with more than a few entrants somehow accidently arriving a little late and giving themselves somewhat less of a distance to run. Strange how that happens.
As nine o’clock passed us by, the race started and a great torrent of riders came sprinting past me, a train that ran for maybe ten minutes before the last stragglers pottered by. Jon got a solid midpack start and battled his way through the traffic to complete lap one in under 43 minutes, a lap quicker than some teams who ended up 20 places or more above us – Steve went after El Capitan and logged an even quicker lap, with Luke putting a great performance in position three and me pottering nervously about on the peripheries as the anchor number four. By the time Luke handed over the team scrunchy, I’d been watching bike racing for almost ninety minutes and was tortured by a mixture of performance anxiety and a sense of gagging to get involved. No matter – time to suck it up and get stuck in.
Oktoberfest Mud – ©Anthony Yeates
Job number one was to charge through the rock garden, and I wasn’t in there many seconds before a most welcome experience occurred – I caught someone up. This was a bit of a new one for me, as I spent most of Bike Fest getting out of people’s way, and the rock garden’s not an easy place to pass. Consequentially, as traffic backed up behind the pair of us, I felt the onset of a needless touch of pressure and ran ride on a slick section, out of everyone’s way. Cursing under my breath, I joined the back of the snake as we pedalled out of the woods and into the field that loops up to where the finish line was or Bike Fest – and I overtook a couple more riders. Me! Overtaking people! It was just great.
Ashton Court was every bit as wonderful as it had been earlier in the year, the flowing single track largely impervious to the wet weather – the sole concession to the elements was the rather impressive construction of a wooden bridge over a particularly marshy section of trail, but the track rode really well and was little the worse at the end of eight hours of racing. Team NTG MTB’s one lap stint policy worked well once more, the 5.7 miles round the course plenty for the likes of our legs (although again, there were lunatics doing the whole thing on their own – madness, I tell thee) and working out so that we each had three laps, but by the time I rolled into the transition area for the final lap, we were up against it. In a desperation move, I left the saddle bag, Camelbak and pump at the van to save weight and took off needing to lap about five minutes quicker than I had done all day. I gave it everything, I swear, I left it all out on the track – by the time I
Oktoberfest Muddy Bikes – ©Anthony Yeates
started the last climb, I was done for. Then some clown , with a dazzling sense of humour, shouted out that there were ten seconds left – gritting my teeth, I turned myself inside out over the last 200 metre climb, came close to stacking in front of the crowd on the finish line jump, then had to invest five minutes or so in serious hyperventational recovery mode. I’d missed the cut by, oooo, five minutes or so which made the last minute or so of torture entirely unnecessary. Thanks, Mr Clown Man.
Final climb idiocy aside, Oktoberfest was every bit as much fun as the Bike Fest earlier in the year, with an easygoing atmosphere and plenty of riding on a wonderful course. I said it after Bike Fest and I’ll say it again here – if you’ve never done an event like this, don’t be intimidated, your fellow competitors are all lovely people (even if some of them are much, much quicker ), the track is superb, and you will have a brilliant time. Can I add a proviso? I was a bit fitter for the second race, and it definitely made it more fun, but you absolutely do not have to be Thomas Frischknecht to enjoy it. I was more like Thomas the Tank Engine, and I still survived….
Bristol Bikefest Image by © Neil AKA FireMonkey (www.iseepeople.co.uk) AKA digphotoneil (flickr)
I’ve been on the periphery of groups of people doing endurance mountain bike racing for a few years now, always on the outside looking in. But I finally got the chance to pop my endurance cherry at the Bristol Bikefest in June as part of a 4 man team going for 12 hour glory. Quite apart from being the event that meant I HAD to buy a new MTB, it was an unbelievable weekend in many ways. Some of them have no words in English adequate to describe them.
Straight off the bat, things were not looking good. Stuck in work at Banbury until six on the Friday evening, Luke, Jon and Steve had long been on site before I could even set off, they had first hand experience of the shocking weather conditions that I didn’t want to know about. Rocking up at eight after McDonalds (race fuel is important, right?) and a long drive, Ashton Court was blustery and wet. The rain had largely stopped, but the ground was wet enough that the toilets had had to be left in a separate field and duck planks laid down to give vehicles a chance to make it into the camping field. I wouldn’t say morale was rock-bottom, but neither was it at it’s adrenaline-filled peak, either. What with hydration being as important as race fuel, I’d optimistically brought a rake load of Kronenbourg, but no-one was in the mood for much more than an early night and good sleep.
The early night bit went off as planned, but the sleeping bit wasn’t great, with gales giving the tents some gyp. With the race kicking off at nine, we were all up and about by half seven, popping to the Luff Bus for bacon rolls and a hot drink – as preparation goes, it wasn’t ideal, but the others had at least had a wander down the day before and seen a few lengths of trail. Preparation, after all, is about more than just hydration and fuel.
After scientifically formulating our riding order (by going “who wants to go first? Who wants to go second?” etc) , Luke was the man to step forward for the important first stint. Following the rider’s briefing, a horde of riders meandered over the horizon to await the nine o’clock start time out of our sight, and when the clock finally struck nine, an endless stream of two-wheeled lunatics came pouring past us after the Le Mans-esque run to the bikes and mad sprint up the hill that starts the event. For the most part, the riders that flooded past were composed and happy-looking – some of them, however, looked pretty gassed straight off the bat. Hard not to get carried away at the start of a race like this, I guess, but the last thing you need is to be knackered 30 seconds after the flag drops on a 12 hour race.
It was, I found, easy to be a smart-arse before I actually took to the track. Scientifically placed at random in the number three slot, I started my stint in glory by not being in the transition area when speedy Steve turned up for the changeover. That hiccup overcome, I rolled out onto the track for the first time, down the hill through the pits, then dived into the woods for some blisteringly fast, flowing single track. And guess what – about 30 seconds in, I was gassed.
It was incredible. I’ve not been to a modern mountain bike facility on a modern mountain bike since, ooo, forever, so finding myself on pristine manmade single track under race conditions was astonishing, a really liberating experience. I flung myself (in relative terms) down the track as fast as I dared, carving arcs through a beautiful green cathedral of trees for a minute or two before a nagging doubt began to creep into the back of my mind – had I missed a turn somewhere? There was nowhere that I’d had any moments of doubt about which way to go, but even looking on the brightest of bright sides, it was unlikely that I was on the pace of the fast folk, nor was it likely that said pace was the same as the folk at the back of the field. Nevertheless, I swear I must have battled through the woods for fully ten minutes in solitude, doubt growing with every turn of the wheel, but the path was so cool, I was loathed to turn back. As I made my way downhill however, eventually I heard the sound of freewheels and chain slap slowly growing behind me. If I was lost, at least it wasn’t just me – cool.
Bristol Bikefest Image by © Neil AKA FireMonkey (www.iseepeople.co.uk) AKA digphotoneil (flickr)
So I cracked on, and I took it steady, knowing there was a long way to go – not taking it easy, running at about 90% instead of flat out, The track had moments of awesomeness, many great lengths of swoopy sweepy singletrack, most of it wide enough to allow faster traffic through, although there was the odd painful climb – a particular standout was the fast downhill hairpin section, very Alpine, that led into a quick righthander before climbing up… And up and up, through a horrible rising righthand hairpin, all wet roots, then a long rocky stretch, nice and damp, horrible and bobbley so you could never relax. It was nasty, and it wasn’t the only bit of track that hurt, but beyond any shadow of a doubt, the bits that stung were nothing compared to the good bits. This track rocks.
I completed lap one with a smidge in reserve, but decided lap two was party time. I went out and gave it everything, from the first turn of the pedal all the way through to the desperate, breathless crossing of the line. Depressingly, it made almost no difference whatsoever, the scant seconds I saved as likely to be down to knowing the course as to the extra effort expended, but it meant that, by the end of the lap, I was almost done. Stint three was an exercise in survival, treading the line between cracking on as fast as I could and keeping a little something in reserve for a final lap four, but by then an eerie spectre had arisen, that we might just – JUST – be able to sneak an extra lap in for one of us. It was a most curious feeling – if Natalie Imbruglia thinks she knows something about being torn, I can tell her she can think again. The extra lap might make a difference in our overall position, but we were all as close to having given our all as to make the prospect of an extra lap, even on this brilliant track, a truly scary prospect.
I put myself forward for the fifth lap then hit the track, running stint four as quick as I could muster, knowing I had Jonno to follow and, if the clock smiled on us, that meant about 35 minute’s rest and the dread lap would be on me. Making the changeover to Jon as swiftly as possible, I trembled out of the changeover area on wobbly legs to check the clock – Luke and Steve were on the job, and the news was… We were JUST out of time to do another lap. Gutted. Relieved, but at the same time, gutted.
The level of competition was an eye-opener (NTG MTB finished 88th out of 95, beaten even by the appropriately-monikered Team Inappropriate Bike, who really were on some shocking equipment), but the atmosphere was cracking, the event well run and everyone was just so friendly. But it was the track that was the star for me – first time out on my first mountain bike in 16 years, I had an absolute blast, even if the hurt lasted a long time. Roll on Oktoberest and the 8 hour endurance event at the same place – see you there…
For more information on both the summer Bikefest and forthcoming Oktoberfest, visit www.bike-fest.com
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