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“Don’t you give me good morning you .............."

Liam St Pierre, Team Echo / 27.06.2009

Sure, it was overcast, we hadn’t slept for over 26 hours since setting off for the GeoQuest start line the morning before and we’d just finished almost 8 hours on the bikes battling hills, faulty derailleurs, mud and the night, but the rise of the sun always seems to pick sleepy racers up again.

The lady on the porch seemed to think differently though. “Don’t you give me good morning you stupid f@#&ing b@#%&ds! Waking me up at f@#&ing 2am in the morning with your talking you bloody a@#%holes!� Craig, another team mate’s response of “Well, I guess a cup of tea is out of the question then?� seemed a much easier response than the full explanation that the noise wasn’t our fault, but that of the leading teams. This small tirade certainly served as a pick me up though, putting an extra bit of spring in the step of the team, however this was rapidly ablated by the first climb up into the surrounding hillside.

The 2009 GeoQuest represented our second foray into this race after a successful outing at Emerald Beach in 2008. The team included one new member, Alistair, along with a new team name: Echo. This year we were hoping to improve on our overall placing in the rankings and possibly take out a win in the men’s category. A look at the line-up suggested one of the largest and strongest fields ever to front a GeoQuest with a lot of tough competition. As with any big race, the logistics started months earlier with a multitude of emails. Getting any team of four healthy racers together and to the start line of a race is half the work itself and I’m sure we all felt like we could have done with a bit more training in any one particular discipline.

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