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.