Well, after coming last in the Isle of Man over Easter, it would have been a shame not to have
entered another Polaris, so myself and AMB's own Andy Chequer entered another one, this time in the
North York Moors. The hills are less intimidating than the Manx ones, but there's more of them.
Chequer's car wasn't too well, so transport was on my shoulders, or rather my parents, as my car is
also not well. I headed East on the two hour drive to Bristol, taking remarkably few attempts to
find my teammate's house.
Having loaded Chequer's kit, and stopping off in a nearby Halfords for a new helmet for me (to
replace the one sitting some 80 miles West of me at that precise moment) we headed North. The
journey was fairly uneventful, apart from the first navigational cockup of the weekend. Chequer
managed to lose the M1. [censored]. We've not even got the bikes out of the back of the car yet, and
we're lost.
Anyway, about midnight-ish and we pulled onto the campsite, setup the tent and cracked open the
beer. Sleep was soon to follow, with myself and Chequer both waking each other up with loud snoring
and the usual whinge of "How come I never wake up with a beautiful woman, only with you?" in the
morning. Registering found many people approaching us saying "Hey, aren't you the guys who came last
in Spring?". Wow. Fame.
Heading from the start, the first checkpoint was a nice easy one. 10 points in the bag and then a
climb. No, this is far too early in the morning. What the hell is this hill doing here? Still, there
was a checkpoint at the end of the climb, a flattish bimble across the head of the valley and then a
sharp plummet to the next checkpoint, the other side of a level crossing, which caused some riders
to be held up for several minutes whilst they waited for a steam train to get out of the way.
Several unexciting checkpoints intervened before one which tested many people, including Mr Chequer
who managed to collapse in a muddy heap on the floor. Fair play to him, I was already shouldering my
bike by this point. The advantage with being the navigator on an event like this is that during the
muddy sections, you don't have to worry about not having a crud catcher on the front of your bike.
The downside of this being that several square miles of the area is now an undecipherable brown
smear on my map. Good job there's no checkpoints in that bit, I suppose.
The next couple of checkpoints take us down tracks that are signed as bridleways. How this can
possibly count as a bridleway is beyond me, given that in most places it's hardly a shoulder's width
across. I ride on reflecting on how I'm sure that stinging nettles used to hurt far more than this
when I were a lad. After grabbing an easy 50 point check, we sit down and discuss tactics. Probably
for longer than was wise, but Chequer needed to have a [censored], just in case anybody got any strange
ideas about him being fit and healthy and all that.
We head off to another check, this time my navigation fails us and we go hammering past the start of
the track we wanted and down a large hill. Why do I never discover my navigation errors until they
involve a really big climb to sort the mess out? We climb back up the hill and spot someone who
looks like he knows where he's going. We try to follow and pretty soon lose our quarry, having to
fall back on good old navigation again. Once again, I mess up and we end up staring at a 6' high
locked gate. Fairly bad mistake, but not quite as bad as losing the M1, I say.
Time was getting on, and we had about 15 miles to get back to the start. It was about this point
that I ran out of water. Damn. After a few miles I was feeling utterly [censored]. After what seemed like
an eternity we stopped at a petrol station to buy some bottled water and carried on with the slow
climb back up to the finish. The water didn't help much, and by the time I got to the end I felt
like death. Once again we'd managed to lose our entire day's score by deft of our lateness.
Sitting back at the car (whilst Chequer cooked his Bacon Bhuna) we discussed the plans for tomorrow.
I was still feeling awful, and Binkie, the pride of Chequer's life was having serious freehub ills.
It seemed that out of the team we had one working bike and one working rider. Still, that meant we
could get leathered that night.
A couple of pints of some interesting real ale, with some interesting company, and soon the band
wandered on. The band in question were Monarchy, a Queen tribute band and the subject of much
heckling given that they were playing in front of several hundred mountain bikers and hadn't
bothered to learn "Bicycle Race".
The next morning we were up with all the people who hadn't wimped out as it's somewhat hard to sleep
on the Polaris campsite at the best of times. We withdrew from the day's riding, packed the car and
headed on the marathon journey South again.
Huw "Sunburned, dehydrated, but still happy" Pritchard