Day 4 of the Hebridean Challenge, and the sun FINALLY decided to show its head. The wind was low, the rain held off and the bays between Scalpay and Tarbet were millpond smooth. The MTBers were out first, leaving the hall at 6am for their Time Trail leg, riding the undulating road back towards Tarbet and then turning off the road onto the ever-popular Rhenigidale Loop. This little gem basically consists of three climbs and three descents, the last of which is a 2km long technical rocky blast. It was this final fling that would cause the heartaches of the week, teams pinch-flatting on the newly-installed drainage channels which have been installed since last years race. While a couple of riders suffered three sets of flats, Graham Crabtree from “Pirates of the Hebridean� managed to survive without any, a fact he put down to running higher tyre pressures, and the fact he crashed on the first drainage bar and was determined not to catch himself out on the others.
At this point in the week, teams are starting to suffer just a little from the lack of sleep, and the strain was beginning to show. Injuries became the theme of the day, one (nameless) cyclist taking a header off his bike three times between the end of the MTB leg and their vans in Tarbet, a distance of only 2km on tarmac. Worse came later in the day, one of 673 Sqn AAC’s riders collided with a somewhat startled sheep, landing with rather intimate areas of his body on the stem of his road bike. He limped the rest of the leg to Clisham car park in a considerable amount of pain, arriving to the laughter and mickey-taking of his team.
SleepMonsters
