This was the grass roots 24 hour race a few years back the 2004 edition was even bigger than Mountain Mayhem. I had never been to the Shimano sponsored Sleepless event and when I turned up for the start I was both surprised and shocked to see so many people and tents.

My Giant team were here. We were told it was a low key event. What this really meant was we had little support! One of our trump cards with Mountain Mayhem is the backup team take looks after us and keeps us on track. Here we did not have a mechanic or even anyone working out what time we should be ready for our changeovers. Welcome to the real world Barrie!

If we wanted any sleep we guessed what time we should be going out, set an alarm and went to sleep in our tent. It seemed to be going ok until the middle of the night. We had about 20 minutes lead over the Scott team after 12 hours of racing. This lead vanished when Elliot Baxter came in after his two laps on course and there was no one to handover to. He had no choice but to come up to the camp and get Ian Wilkinson out of bed. We were now 5 minutes behind the Scott team. I was sleeping and knew nothing about this. Ian did some fast laps and Paul Oldham did too. When I was back on course were back in the lead. We slowly increased the lead we had, eventually finishing more than 30 minutes up on our rivals.