i want to ride my bicycle, i want to ride my bike

so this past sunday i was in a mountain bike race - 6 hour race. they marked out a course through the woods that was about 11 kilometres, and the point is to ride as many laps as you can in the 6 hour period. you can enter as a team of 2, 4 or 6, or solo. i chose to enter this event solo, just to see if i could ride for 6 hours straight. my longest rides so far this year have been around 2 or 3 hours, so a 6 hour ride would be a real test for me. the race started at 10 am and ended at 4pm, and i managed to complete a total of 7 laps, taking only short breaks in between each lap to refill water bottles. so i was quite pleased that i was able to ride that long with no signifcant rest periods.

i did take a couple of little spills on my bike. the first was on lap 4 or 5, near the end, along a long straightaway. I was riding along at my leisurely pace when i heard a rider approaching from behind. i heard him yell 'rider coming up on your left', so i steered my bike to the right. a guy whipped past me, and i proceed to go back to the left where the main singletrack trail was, and this second guy plowed into me, pushing me off my bike into the raspberry bushes. he fell too, but stayed on the trail. and he gets up yelling at me, saying "i said there were 2 riders coming on your left". meanwhile, i'm stunned, scraped up from landing in prickly raspberry bushes, saying "all i heard was 'coming on your left'". this moron is still yelling as he rides away, not even checking to see if i was ok. i finally got up, all scratched and sore, yelling "thanks a lot buddy". i ended up with a raspberry-bush scratch across the front of my neck. it's not deep but it looks nasty, like i tried to slit my own throat.

my second fall was on my last lap when i was quite tired. i was riding down a hill and there was a tree-root, followed by a bit of a dropoff. i'd ridden this without incident each lap before, but i was tired, so i thought i'd slow down and take it easy. bad mistake. the front wheel stopped and i must have been leaning forward, for i was tossed over the bike, which did a complete flip and ended up backwards on the trail. i landed on my hands and knees, adding new scrapes to both knees. i rolled over onto my back to rest and assess the damage. thankfully no riders were coming up behind me. eventually, i got up, brushed myself off and continued down the trail. i finished my last lap just before 4pm and felt a sense of relief, not to mention satisfication.

if i wasn't so sore and tired, i would have patted myself on the back!