MONT 24 Hour Australian MTB Championship
Solo racing is SO not glamorous . . .
Rosi King / 28.10.2005
And I realised in an instant that I had fallen asleep with my head on my knees as I was going to the toilet at one of the several mid trail Port-a-loos on the 20km circuit.“How long was I asleep for� I wondered? Angry at myself, I shook the pins and needles out of my legs, shivered with cold and noticed as I picked my bike up off the mud the fuel gauge on my Niterider Flight headlight had gone down another notch – eeek! Not much light left to get back to camp with.
It was somewhere in the middle of the night and I was struggling badly. Not with physical exhaustion – my legs felt just fine, but with the sleepmonsters. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.
I got back on the Cannondale Rush to ride – luckily there was more single track right there. I found that I could sort of ride the single track because as soon as my eyes shut to sleep, I would ‘sketch out’ or slip on a wet tree root, or run into a rock, or get slapped by a tree and that would wake me up again for the next few minutes before the whole cycle was repeated:
vision goes blurry - try to wake self up by shouting or slapping face - vision goes blurry - eyes close – bike drifts off line - wake up as crashing or about to crash.
It’s the most miserably horrible feeling when you so desperately want to be awake but just can’t make your eyes stay open.
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