Scottish Enduro Round 1- Fortwilliam

As I set off up the hill in the cold wind and pouring rain I knew this was going to be a hard day. My legs were hurting before I'd even started stage 1 as I'd already done a full days practising the day before and the hill to the top was pretty long and steep. Stage 1 was down the worlds champs xc course all the way from the top; there was a lot of pedalling and my legs were hurting a lot but i think it went quite well. Then it was all the way back up for stage 2 which was down a steep, rocky, rooty, extremely muddy natural trail. It was impossible to keep momentum as the mud was so thick: I think I spent more time off the bike- on the ground, sliding down the hill, or trying to run because it was impossible to cycle- than actually on my bike. I was dead at the end of stage 2 as it was such hard work in the mud. Stage 3 wasn't much better, but at least there was a river at the end so I managed to remove some of the mud from my bike. It was a really long way from stage 3 back to the car park and then up the hill to stage 4, but stage 4 was nice and short and relatively less muddy than 2 and 3 so I quite enjoyed it. Although I was super tired by stage 4 and it turned out that actually it was my worst stage. I was really pleased to have won junior girls in the end, even though there was only two of us in the category, because the other girl is a really good rider. 

Innerleithen SDA 2014

This was my first ever SDA and I was feeling pretty nervous but also excited: I liked the track at Innerleithen and I was looking forward to trying a new discipline. After 3 practice runs on the Saturday and 1 practice run on the Sunday morning, it was time to race. Getting to the top took quite a while though as we had a 2 mile cycle along the road to get to the uplift buses, and then when we got to the top we had a further 10 minutes of pushing to get to the start of the track. The course started on some muddy, rooty turns and then went onto some gap jumps which required a lot of pedalling. After that it was more steep muddy turns with a very steep shoot into a tight corner, some log drops and lots of roots.  My first run went pretty well but my feet kept slipping around on the flat pedals and my pedals kept hitting the ground when I was sprinting which was a little annoying and slowed me down a bit. When I got to the bottom I was quite surprised I had the fastest time with 4 mins 34 seconds; but second place was only a mere 0.93 seconds behind so I had to try and improve on my next run. However the second run didn't really go to plan though as I went too fast into the corner before the gap jumps and skidded out so I didn't have enough speed to completely clear them all. I finished the second run 2 seconds slower than my first, but fortunately my first run time wasn't beaten by anyone so I won the junior girls and I was also 3rd fastest woman overall which surprised me a lot. I really enjoyed the weekend though and the race had a great atmosphere to it; I will definitely be doing some more SDA's this year.