The Muddy Buddy

On Sunday morning we climbed out of bed at 5:30. Although the race only started at 9am we needed to be at the venue by 7am to watch the Boks take on the Aussies in the semi final of the World Cup. It was great to sit in amongst some good Bok supporters at the venue and swear at the ref over what were some VERY questionable decisions.

The Boks played a fantastic game (bar a few minor handling errors) and managed to have the majority of both possession and territory. Despite this the ref (Bryce Laurence) managed to blow us out of the game, and despite leading with 10 minutes to go, the Boks sadly went down.

Thankfully the race started 10 minutes later which quickly got my mind off of the loss.

The running leg went well bar a short walk Sharon needed to do with a kilometre to go (the hill was tough but we were building up a nice lead and I wanted to maintain it). Then it was onto the bikes which also went surprisingly well…at first.

We were overtaking other teams left right and centre when we hit a thorny patch on the course. When I looked down at my tires I must’ve had 40+ thorns in each. Sharon’s tires were the same and so were everyone’s around us.

I stopped and pulled out one of the devil thorns only to hear a jet of air. Sigh. I promptly told Sharon to leave the thorns in hoping they would plug the holes. They didn’t. A hundred meters later and all 4 of our tires were flat. We were each only carrying a single spare which we put in and then set about repairing the other tubes.

Soon we were out of puncture repair patches and realised we had to call it a day. This meant running back to the start, pushing the bikes, and pulling out of the race (during which time we punctured one of the replaced tubes). This also meant that we didn’t get to do the obstacle course and mud pit which was rather disappointing. We did however claim our free towels and shirts at the finish line.

Somewhat annoyed we decided to head home, secretly happy to see other people pushing their bikes to the finish and catching lifts in bakies. Misery does love company after all.

On route home we stopped at the Pavilion and bought some new tubes with slime (next time we’ll be ready dammit). We then set about repairing the tubes we could for spares and cleaning the bikes. All in all we had to throw out the 4 tubes since they had around 20-30 punctures each.

And that was pretty much it for the weekend. Not a great sporting weekend; Bafana…out, Springboks…out and us…out. That said, it was still a great weekend.