the welsh, 2 day enduro

'the welsh' was celebrating it's 60th year of this formidable 2 day rally enduro across central wales starting in llandrindon wells and circling around to rhayader. deep in the welsh hills, 3 timed special stages, along the 180 mile daily route. 600 bikes started at 8am, 4 bikes at a time, including a large number of side-cars - there was barely enough room for a two-wheeled machine at times, i have no idea how they made it round??!! (i've had to find random photos of the event to give you an idea)

i arrived early on wednesday morning so that we could scrutineer the bikes and walk some of the special stages. nothing looked too technical provided it did not rain, but i was in the welsh hills and rain it probably would! zippy, patsy, ross, sean, gary (goggles), chris and myself were all competing. camped on the a section of grass next to the lake in the edge of town, i woke at 5am to heavy rain and it showed no signs of letting up much before my start time at around 10am. b@£$ocks! so the day started, and i did not return until 9 hours later and there was no respite on this timecard event.

i cocked up the first special, as soon as i hit the very soft mud i rode like a novice!! it was a bit like doing a 100m sprint with no warm up, arms pumped, lungs throbbing, pathetic..... oh well, 2 more tests to make up for it. to be honest, the liaisons were harder than the specials, in fact the next 2 specials were a lot of fun; essentially 2 motocross circuits. the first was what i would call a proper motocross track, the second was laid out as one on the side of a grassy hill, so where the first you could ride hard into the corners without the risk of sliding, the second was very slippery and i slid out of 4 corners on my lap!!

due to the rain, the biggest challenge was yet to come, the river crossings along the section called strata florida. horror stories of raging torrents turning over bikes and riders were realised and as i crossed i was met with a scene from a war film, bikes scattered everywhere, upended trying to drain the engines and airboxes of water.

unlike other events i had competed in, when the day ended, you only had 20 minutes to clean and prep your bike before returning it to parc ferme for day 2. although i managed to scrape off a lot of mud, my only real issue were twisted handle bars after a rather spectacular jump while traveling down hill on a goat track.....i did not land very well!

day 2 started out dry as we repeated the previous day's route in reverse. where i had lost about 50 mins on the liaisons before, i did not drop any time. apparantly the conditions we had experienced were worse than they had been in years, so a fair number of riders had pulled out at the end of the first day!!

ross had a clutch problem, so in the short amount of time between leaving parc ferme and starting, under zippy's guidance from the sidelines, we laid the bike over and replaced all the clutch plates. patsy soon joined to lend a hand as i had to shoot off to the start. but in the space of about 20 minutes, ross was back on two wheels, awesome!!

all in all it was a great weekend, 17 hours of racing, with championship riders like tom sagar racing past at blistering speed and i mean seriously fast!!!! everyone of the desert rose team completed the event and it was great preparation for ross, as he was soon to tackle the infamous romaniacs......