Mezière avec un bierre

Wednesday 25th August in Meziere.

Our prerace bantor of Google Earth profiling and race pace prognostics filled my shoes with primed pistons ready for blastoff. The gun blast went off and my throttle hit the floor trying to get infront of everyone before we hit the forest area. I had terrible visions of the same thing reoccuring as in St Prex where everone had to walk to cross the bridge and we all lost 1 minute. This wasn't going to happen again and so ignoring Garmins warnings I blasted past as many slow pokes as I could. Please excuse the entirely relative expression but in my definition anyone I can pass is a slowpoke, and those passing me are overstrung poor managers of their pacing which I will inevitably gallop past very shortly as soon as we hit the hills. Its a sort of personal ego trip I entertain everytime to cope with the adversities, lots of fun even if its more fictional then anything. After 2 km I get my second garmin reading, 1st km 4:37, second 5:58, right on Stefans target. The rather challenging structures of this course included narrow rocky paths, slippery muddy sections where I called out at one point "ça glisse, ça glisse" and felt like I had made my philanthropic gesture to mankind for the rest of the race. Some quite steep climbs including the finishing 500 meters and steep downhill sections where my feet were trying to run away from me. Hey there! get back here! At some point I heard a starter gun go off and I hypothesized that this must be a Meziere tradition that once the first person crosses the finish line, they let everyone know it by firing off the gun. This was confirmed when shortly after I heard another gunblast go off, and I emmediately knew that this must be when the first "Lady" crossed the finish line. I glanced down at my watch and thought to myself "wow Tenke sure is fast"
Then as I continued I became more and more perplexed when the gun shots continued, but racing has a way of putting me in a nonsensical dreamy state where life contradictions don't spark any inquisition and I happily continued my race. Not soon thereafter the entire woods began to resonate with the beautiful harmony of Alphorns, this was truly a lovely site to pass the Alphorn band serenading us as we pounded down their soil.

My finish was another fun sprint to catch the guy who had passed me on the last 500 meter incline and with great satisfaction I dashed infront of this unsuspecting prey to steal one last position for the roster. I had a bit of extra time one evening to play with the results excel file and discover the Vlookup function. Now I can see in green all the people who were ahead of me in StPrex and Genolier that I managed to beat in Mezieres, and it only took me two hours! The Stats don't lie and going by the projected curve of position 373 to 307 to 258 I hope to be somewhere among the 210 in Chavornay.

There is something to be said about participating in such events with others and I must say I enjoyed just as much the car ride in/out and the postrace meal with Rich, Niall, Stefan and Tenke as I did the race itself. Thanks everyone for the good memories. Oh and Richard I hope you managed to get the mud off your nice new pink runners. ;o)