the Fullsus.com team complete thier first competitive event

On Saturday 12th July Craig and Myself (Steven) participated in our first competitive Mountain biking event.

For a while now we had played with the idea of entering a competition. Not that we were expecting to win something, just to experience the event, have a couple of drinks and talk about cycling all weekend. I had been working away from home a lot so I had very little miles put in the couple of months before the event. I think I managed the Red route at glentress, the Loch Lomond trail and a trip to Carron Valley. Craig on on the other hand did managed to commit to some training before the event which was a big help.

Anyway, The event that we signed up for was the 10 at Kirroutree event organised by Nofussevents. It was open to entrants of all fitness levels which would suit us.

The idea was to do the event as a trio. A nice number as it gives you more time to re

cover, eat, and there would always be 2 of you at base to keep things right. However, Allan was forced to pull out of the event (Wuss!) the week before. The FULLSUS.COM team's quest for a respectible performance was shifted onto the shoulders of the remaining two.

At this point, I'm starting to worry. Very little training time and now having to complete the event as a doubles team. That meant that we would have had half the time to recover and would have also have to put in more laps than expected. And to make things worse we soon realised that and we would only see each other for the 15-30 seconds it took to swap over the tag between laps.

The event itself was excellent. Like many others we went down and camped in our tent the night before. Luckily it was a dry night as the tent proved to be a bit awkward to set up first time round. Unfortunately we did a bit of socialising the night before and the single malt started to pour. Possibly another schoolboy error, but an excelent way to end the evening.

It was a bit strange in the morning. It was our first chance to have a look at what bikes everyone was using. Most competitive entrants would of course be very weight concious with lots of fantastic carbon bikes. With low travel forks and hardtails. Us on the other hand had our trust trails bikes; My Orange five and Craig's Specialized stumpjumper FSR. Another concern that hit me!!

The event itself went OK. We both put in respectible lap times our first time round and were feeling pretty good and confident about the rest of the day. Unfortunatly, especially for myself we couldn't keep up the pace and the lap-times dropped. But we did mange to complete 7 laps between us which was fine by me considering the circumstances.

The experience was excellent with the photographers out and other folk cheering you on giving you an added drive.

As I said, the event was outstanding. The organisation, food, and entertainment was credit to the organisers. I do hope we agree to do more of these.