Once again me and Cavey paired up.
It had rained, hard, from mid-day till about an hour before the start.
I volunteered for the 1st lap.
I got a good start however a course taping cock-up meant us leaders were sent the wrong way so I spent much time fighting through the pack to make back some places.
Half way around the course I cheekily overtook some other riders where there wasn't really enough room, I cut back in and had to keep the speed up so as not to hold them up. This led me to take a tight left/right too quickly and I glanced a tree. My shorts snagged on a little branch and ripped down the side, all the way from the top to the bottom! A cry from behind of "Oh, fucking hell!" confirmed I would have to do the rest of the lap with my arse and tackle flapping about in the autumn air! Fortunately I'd managed to stay on the bike and even more fortunately I had spare shorts in the car!
The taping cockup hadn't cost us too badly and we were in 5th place at the end of lap 1!
The rest of the night was incident free. The temperature dropped to around freezing and as usual the sunrise in the forest was stunning. I passed through one forest opening which was strewn with frozen cobwebs with shafts of sunlight glistening through.
As the night went on we moved up into 4th place and managed to hold onto that all the way to the end. With 2 laps to go there was some timing confusion that meant we might be able to nudge up into 3rd and onto the podium, but in reality that wasn't ever going to happen. We ended up 4th, with Cavey managing to get back over the line with only a couple of minutes to spare!
We've paired up for D2D 3 times now and this is the best result we've had and I'm exceedingly chuffed with it.
