So the day of qualifying rolls round and I’m awoken at 5AM. I meant what the f—k! Who rides bikes in the middle of the night?! If they want the best out of me they should let me wake up about 9, let me lie in for a bit with a cup of tea, maybe crack one out, a couple of rounds of toast with Jeremy Kyle, go through my emails, make a few phone calls, take a shower then think about getting dressed before rolling out of the house. If they let me have it my way I’d have been up on the mountain at about 2PM fresh, limbered up and ready to send it. But oh no! They want the very first thing I do that day to be travel bleary eyed down a rock face at 40MPH with 200 other chumps.

So I take a plethora of strangely shaped lifts up to the tip of the world to get to the qualifying race. Hundreds of other early risers congregate at the top of the peak, looking down at the valley below where the cars looked like ants and also where the race ended. I look down at my bike, then I look down to the bottom of the mountain and the “maff” just doesn’t seem to be adding up. A parachute seemed more appropriate. Through riding BMX for 15 years I’ve travelled all round the world and ridden some truly crazy spots. But even the 30ft wide fullpipes in Australia, the massive sets of trails in America and the 25ft deep empty reservoir up North, all of them paled into insignificance as I sat up there on top of a f-king mountain on a f-king pogo stick on wheels.

The wind is blowing, it’s trying to rain, I’m freezing cold and I’m wearing a leotard. My first time certainly wasn’t a love story that’s for sure. And there was no chance of me getting anyone pregnant up there as I was wearing a lot more protection than Durex could ever offer. I used my D-grade in GCSE French to listen out for my number to be called and it was almost immediately. Turns out some moron had decided I should start on the front row. So I take my place at the front of the grid, it might as well have been death row. Then the bastards make me sit there for 20mins while they round up as many other people as they can get to put behind me and chase me down the hill. As the five ‘minute to go’ was held up by a vaguely good looking girl who, although wearing a full-length jacket, definitely had one of those tattoo at the bottom of her back, I got scared. I looked over my shoulder and it looked like one of them battle scenes from Lord of the Rungs. One million helmeted Orcs shouting and jeering with me cowering like a sheep right at the front.

Up goes the ‘1 minute’ board. Now I’m really shitting it, I’m seriously looking for a way out. I look around, helplessly trying to find an exit, but it was gonna take more than a note from my mum to get me out of this physical education lesson. So I sit there surrounded by Orcs and sift through my seriously limited options for when the rope drops and conclude that the only thing I can do is go with it. So with my heart in my mouth the 30 second board goes up and this crazy euro pop music starts blaring and suddenly I’m awake, wide f–king awake! Upon my arrival at the summit my primary concern was with the steep mountain that we had to ride down. Now my biggest fear was the army behind me and the mountain was now my saviour, my only way to get away from them. So when the rope dropped my cherry popped. The high concentration of adrenalin pumping round my body meant I actually got a pretty good start and for the first 50 metres or so it felt like the ‘running of the bulls’. I felt like a small Spanish boy running for his life down a street with a herd of angry mechanical bulls hurtling down behind him, baying to gorge his heart out. By the first bottleneck of a corner the pack was upon me and then the race really turned nasty. I’ve seen more civilized bar fights, with the dust thick like smoke and bikes flying around like bar stools it felt more like a south London pub on a Friday night than the top of a mountain. Most people I spoke to claimed to be entering the Avalanche for just for a laugh: they were lying, every one of them was lying through their full–face helmets. They wanted blood, my blood it felt. During the fight I managed to duck out the back door but they continued to chase me. And I thought your first time was supposed to be special.

Rocks, snow, mud, French people…my knobbly tyres sure did pass over many different surfaces on their journey down the hill. As the pack thinned out my fears swung back from other people to the mountain before me. I’m used to 20inch wheels and zero inches of suspension, so every time my front wheel slammed another water melon sized rock I shut my eyes, expecting a massive impact and to get sent OTB. But it never happened, I just bounced right over them, I guess I was literally riding on air. After the first 5mins or so I fell into some kind of trance: I felt like the pilot of a fighter plane in a Top Gun movie, dodging and weaving, ducking and diving. I was really getting into it until I realized I’d stopped breathing.

After pulling over to get some air into my tar filled prune like lungs I was good to go again. But after another five minutes of playing the arcade game that is downhill mountain biking I had to stop again. This time my hands had stopped working. If anyone says your first time doesn’t hurt then they too are lying, my hands throbbed from arm pump, they were all stuck fast, curled up like stiff dead crabs. Unable to get my way through it, I propped myself up against the Pain Barrier for a couple of minutes for a breather and wished it was all over.

I could sense the finish approaching and spent the last five minutes not looking where I was going, just looking at my hands as I tried every possible combination of finger/brake lever/gear changer arrangement to minimize pain in my hands. After crossing the line I fell into a steaming heap on the floor, after catching my breath and realizing that the damage to my hands wasn’t permanent, I pulled my self up and took a walk around. The scene was reminiscent of a war zone: I stumbled through worn out bodies and broken bikes trying to find my platoon, I was issued my rations, which of course were compromised of ham and cheese with a dry bagpipe, the token stale bread would have probably hurt to swallow, but I was numb to pain by this point so down it went. With my breath fully back and my hands working again I took my condom off and sat down for a post coitus cigarette to reflect on my performance.

I didn’t do too bad. If the mountain were a woman then she would have been left semi–satisfied, but seeking complete fulfillment she invited me back to try again the next day. I ended up qualifying for the Mega Promo, which is a poor mans version of the Megavalanche, but not quite the homeless, smackhead version which is the Mega Infinity. The top 400 qualifiers go in the Mega, the next 400 go in the Promo and all the pot–heads go in the Infinity.