DJ - That was one hell of an enduro!
I smoked through the first section dropping 4 points and passing a bunch of riders. Did you know that when two KTM 4-strokes go down in a rock garden, they make for excellent traction. After squatting in the trees at the first reset I had to haul ass down the road and zero'd the check-in to the second section.
I was still doing pretty good until I lost the trail (I've gotta stop following the bike in front of me) and had to turn around. When I did find the trail it took me straight into another rock garden where a few riders I had already passed were once again floundering. In the middle of it all was an XR600 with a broken chain. I bull-dogged my way through and promptly lost the trail... again. When I finally did spot another arrow it led me up this hill with a series of rock ledges (is this the infamous ledges section?) I dropped my bike three times in an effort to make it up. When I finally reached the top I had to rest and cool down a bit. I heard several bikes approaching and when I looked forward there was a group of riders that I had passed in the first section coming right at me. They ended up turning left before they got to me. Now I'm not sure if I followed the wrong trail or if these guys cut the course, but I took off after them. Unfortunately another unfortunate incident going up the next big hill forced me to take another unscheduled break. By the time I made it to Dan's E-check I was so far behind it wasn't even funny.
The ride back to the pits and the short rest rejuvinated me and, against my better judgement, I headed out on the second loop. Unfortunately, due to a mathematical error, I burned the next check after the restart by two minutes. I left that check and headed into the next section where I decided to use a boulder to remove half my rear brake pedal. This made going downhill rather tricky. In trying to avoid a serious incident I blazed some new trail and completely lost the arrows. I followed a trail until it popped out on a road where I saw an arrow which I followed to check 8. The only problem was I missed check 7. The guys said I could continue riding the last 15 miles, but instead I put on a skirt and took the Nancy path back to the pits.
My hat's off to the Bershire Trail Riders for putting on this event. My conditioning (or lack of) was a definite factor in the mental mistakes that I made. However I'm not going to even complain about the 95° and 80% humidity.