My Mayhem
Seeing as everyone else has blogged about it… 
If I think about it, 24hr “Enduro” racing is everything I don’t ride bicycles for. It’s roadie racing on grass and dirt. It’s flipping hard work with little in the way of immediate reward.
But for one weekend every year I absolutely love it. Slogging it around a place that looks more like a re-enactment of the First World War trenches than a race course is not about mountain biking. It’s much more than that.
It’s about testing yourself. Mayhem is about being humbled by Elite riders big-ringing it up climbs while you’re off and pushing. It’s about being even more impressed by the have-a-goers lugging a £100 shonk-bike around and still smiling. It’s about getting out of a sleeping bag at 4am to put on clammy lycra. It’s about trying to eat something at 6am without vomiting. It’s about beating the rest of your team. It’s about not letting your team mates down.
This year was simultaneously the hardest and easiest Mayhem I’ve done. It was physically the hardest Mayhem due to the weather conspiring to make the course the most energy-sapping, anti-freewheeling experience possible - the worst conditions to race a bike in I’ve ever seen. Yet it was motivationally the easiest Mayhem because of my team mates. Watching Matthew, Mats and Mike come in after every single lap looking completely spent was more than enough inspiration. I knew all of them gave it their all and so there was no alternative but to do the same. And it hurt. It hurt like Hell.
The reward of racing for 24 painful hours seeps in after the final klaxon has sounded. The main reward I find is pride. Being proud of your team mates and, more importantly, being proud of yourself.