Challenge Stu

Last weekend's High Peak 40 was not my greatest race. I travelled to Buxton on Friday night, planning to stay in the van overnight ready for the race on Saturday. Unfortunately it would seem that driving slowly late at night near a school attracts attention, and after looking for somewhere to stop for a while I was stopped by the police! After being breathalysed and told to drive less eratically I carried on and found a quiet road to stop on. Anyway, the next day was the race. The HP40 is quite flat, with no big ups and downs. The terrain is also pretty hard (hard like tarmac, not hard like difficult), making it a relatively fast race. This means it's not my favourite race, but I had been feeling pretty good before the start, and decided that I would like to have a good go at winning a race. So when the pace wasn't too fast off the start I moved to the front, passed Martin Beale and set off into the unknown! At checkpoint 1 I was, for the first time ever, the first per...

It's taken a while, but here's a report on the Raid in France... There's also a video  here Before the Apex race in May, I said it would by my first and last expedition race. It didn't quite go to plan, but it was a very memorable introduction to long races and I decided maybe one more... So I found myself in Buis le Baronnies in the south of France at the end of August, preparing for the 2011 Raid in France. I was to be racing with Dave Spence, Caz Bullard and Kev Honeyset, so I would definately be the least experienced member of the team! We arrived in Buis a couple of days before the start, and passed the time building bikes, shopping (mainly for cake), practicing our rope ascending and arguing with the event organisers over whether our candles were big enough. Sadly they were not and we had to get new candles. Team Accelerate (l-r): Dave, Kev, Caz and me The race was advertised as a “Back to Nature” event, part of which meant that we would not have acces...