Questars Race 2 – 30 May 2009 – Brecon Beacons, South Wales
Race 2 was held in the Brecon Beacons at a slightly different location to the place last year.
Last year I competed with Dave in the 5 hour version and Steve did it on his own (6 hour version). This time I teamed up with Steve and we did the Masters trio (6 hours, 3 events – running, kayaking and cycling).
On the Friday night I picked Steve up from his house in Northampton, then we headed for the nearest Subway for dinner. After eating that, we drove deep into the foreign land that is Wales and headed for the Premier Inn hotel in Pentrebach, Merthyr Tydfil. I had phoned before I booked to see if it was okay to bring out bikes into the hotel room and they said it was, when we checked in the girl said that she remembered talking to me about it 
So we settled in and unloaded all our gear. Then I attempted to fit 2 new wheels that I had bought and received 2 days before. I replaced the front wheel okay, but didn’t know that I would need some additional tools for the rear wheel, so I ran the race with a new tubeless wheel on the front and my tubed wheel on the rear.
Working on Bikes in Hotel Room
While flicking through the TV channels, Starship Troopers appeared. Amazingly Steve admitted to not having seen it before (he isn’t a true geek), so we sat and watched it until 01:30 – we should have learned by now that it’s not good to watch TV until the early hours the night/morning before a race!
The next morning we got up and it was a 25-30 minute drive to the event. It was a hot day and I ended up with just a dribble of water left in my 3 litre Camelbak after the 6 hours. We did most of the running stage before the kayaking (it was nice to go kayaking to cool off a little). We got a little lost on the running section – we even stepped over barbed wire and crawled under an electric fence! We didn’t do that well on the biking stage either – we rode past a couple of checkpoints and Steve got 3 punctures (which beats my 2 punctures in the last race!) Plus Steve lost his saddle bag which contained his toolkit – doh!
Straight after the race, we headed to the local pub for a lemonade. Then from there we headed to another pub (which we discovered last year) and had another fantastic dinner.
Steve (left) and Paul (right) waiting for Dinner to Arrive
So overall although we didn’t do so well, we had a good time, got a little bit fitter, wiser and more experienced; so it was a good day