Langkawi MTB Challenge stage 1:

On the morning of stage 1 I woke up at 6.30am am felt very sick in the stomach and then soon after I vomited!

This was the start of a very long day which involved vomiting all day until I was convinced by Dan McConnell at 2pm to go to the Hospital (Dan had also come down with food poisoning at 2am and visited the hospital that morning). I made the trip to the Langkawi Hospital and was hooked up to the IV dripper and injected with anti nausea and vomiting medication.

I still continued to vomit until around 6pm and counted my 14th spew for the day! I obviously was unable to race the first stage....

Today is stage 2 and the plan is to start the race and get lapped out so I can race in the later stages of the tour. If I don't start today then I won't be able to compete in the last 3 stages.

So it was a very frustrating and long day of feeling horrible yesterday, but today I woke up feeling a lot better. Andrew Mock was sick last night with similar issues. So the food poisoning is getting around and I will be very careful on what I'm eating over the next few days.

In the racing side of things the Aussies in General had a very unlucky day. Lach Norris was flying, but had his wings clipped with two flat tyres. He still managed to minimise his losses to 5min and finish 6th. Ben Hendo had two flat's also and had to walk 13km to the feed zone! Many riders were effected by the heat and blew up with no water at feed station 2! Kyle Ward was selected for random drug testing and was so dehydrated that he had to wait 7hrs to get enough of a sample out for testing!!!

So it has been interesting so far here in Langkawi and I guess things can only be on the up and up from here. Oh and I also lost 4 games of Backgammon this morning over breakfast which was very crushing ;-)

I hope I can upload some positive stories and photos tomorrow.


cheers.