The infamous Kona 100 (was Schwinn 100). For the last two years I have been going on about doing this race and I finally got around to it! We made our way down to the campsite on Saturday 6th July 2002 and got the tent setup by about 5pm. We had a quick look around the barn where the shops and registration stands were. I decided to buy a set of crud catchers (f & r) as the thought of riding for 8 hours with a wet bum really didn't seem very appealing. After registration we took a looksee at the route which was laid out on a couple of OS maps stuck to the wall - "that dosn't look too bad" said Mike! famous last words.
We then used our tickets to collect our free energy products from the High5 stand, well this actually turned out to be one energy gel pouch! still not to worry as we had been assured that there would be free food and drink on the feeding stations at 16k intervals.
A about 7 we decided to go and get our pasta from the "pasta party" well one little container of pasta later that was all over and I started munching away on the enery and grain bars I took with me! oh - this was washed down with a couple of stubbies :0) At 11pm we all decided it was time to try and get some sleep.
I woke up a 5:15am and was buzzing; toilet roll in hand I wandered to the gents (no queue !) then on my return started to re-build my bike and fit the new mudguards. Gray was next up and we got some coffee going accompanied with a gert big bowl of muesli.
At about 9:40 we made our way to the start line and at 10 on the dot we were off --- well we actually got going about 5 minutes later! 1700 cyclists trying to get through one gate takes a bit of time! The ride was far to long to describe it here but there were some bloody big hills and fantastic downhill's. There was one stage probably about 6-7K long which was completely unrideable, not suprising really as by this point over 1000 bikes had been down a lovely wet and muddy singletrack! still after about 2 hours of pushing our bikes along with hundreds of other people we got out of the woods and on our way again. At the next checkpoint 64K we were chatting to some cyclists which had been delayed by a helicopter air lifting an injured rider to hospital!!
The event was excellent apart from the lack of food and fluids at the feeding stations - I phoned the week before the race just to check on what food/drink I needed to carry and if I'd listened to the advice I was given "just take enough to get to the first feeding station" there is no way I would have been able to finish the race! Also when you're expecting over 1500 riders on one site perhaps it might be wise to have more than 20 toilets :0(
We all finished and it took us 9:52 which isn't too good but we did ride as a team and finish together, one thing to keep in mind as your laughing at our finish time is that 333 riders didn't even finish! We came in at positions: 958,959,960 overall and 297/98/99 in the Men's open category of which 429 started and 114 didn't finish.