Niall Frost at National Marathon Champs
Sunday 1st of June saw the 4th running of the National Mountain Bike Marathon Championships at Margam Park in Wales. The event format was 4 laps of a 25km course allowing riders a chance to collect food/drink and repairs after each lap.
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Margam Park has a history of providing testing courses, combining steep loose climbs with natural singletrack descents and fast fire-road sections used in the RAC Rally. Light showers overnight saw the course become greasy in places with drier patches in the east and the forecasted rain never materialised.
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From the gun the going was easy and despite boarding the “chunderbus” for one lap I sat quite happily with a friend from the RAF until the halfway stage. Lap three was the beginning of the end as I decided to increase the pace. I attacked the opening climbs in harder gears and appeared out on the back of the course feeling great (for the last time that day). From then on my diet of one bottle a lap, a nutra-grain bar and half a chocolate gel (yuck) for 65km of riding caught up with me and I began to get the cramps of doom. I had to throttle back on the attacking and just rode at a steady pace to finish the lap.
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Lap four was exciting, as I didn’t get lapped! I did begin what was to be 1hr 28mins of sufferfest. I cried my way up the opening climbs and nearly fell off a couple of times while descending. Despite my apparent softness when the going got tough I managed to finish 22nd which I’m told yielded some UCI points which should be enough to get me gridded at my next marathon in Bourg D’Oisans in July.
