this will be boring to most!!
just let me ramble and get it out my system, as it is the first 24hr event i have done.
I did this in a team of 3 which i think is a good ballance for first attempt. we took up a horse lorry as the base for the event which worked great with room in the back to work on the bikes out of the weather and the living gave us somewhere to sleep and cooke. I was on a borrowed bike from a friend(Andy Black) i met him when i was in dooleys and he kindly offerd his bike,it was only when i picked up the bike that i realised it was a mega carbon all singing and dancing mtn bike.
We all met up on sat morning at fort william, the weather was not to bad.The event has a running start and our first rider can run fast, so we startred the day 4th, this lasted about 15 seconds and as Josh described it ,every body just passed me.
We started not to bad however and managed to hold between 14th and 15th place for most of the afternoon.Then the weather changed and the bikes started to clog up and break. By 7pm we were on lights, i was first to have bike failure no breaks then no gears other than granny ones(lucky) at this point it was around 1am and miserable, then to top it off my saddle fell off!!
This sort of thing kept going on through a long and miserable night.
By 7am it started to bet light and we were down from 4 bikes to 1.5 bikes.Brake pads were lasting on average 3 runs, which is 24 miles.
by mid day we had moved up to 8th overall and 4th in our category, which was great but galling to have missed the podium by one place,it could have been me up there with page 3 girls and champane!
A great event but the weather was harder than the cycling. I will do it again next year though.