The Le Mans of Knockhill

It's been a long night.

The pits echo with the whirr of turbo trainers and rollers, and murmured syllables in front of the screen tracking the results. The computer tells me that the air temperature has dropped to three degrees - colder in here than out there - and I am wearing almost everything I have as I gently spin my legs back into action.

Gloves on, buff on. I change my hat so quickly that the draft perceptibly cools my head. That's not the worst part, though. The worst part is always the jersey - switching out the fleece, the coat, for a layer of polyester, a rain jacket, and a gilet. No, wait, that's not the worst. The worst is dragging myself out of my sleeping bag, fetid now with the constantly-replaced sweat, prizing my eyes open to start this whole cycle again. The changing. The warm-up. The rolling out into the pin-pricked night to roll back and forth up the pit lane as I wait for that mini sun that is Jim's light.

But I do it anyway. I do it because I just checked my watch, and I know it's time to start. I start now, because I need to be there for Jim. Jim goes out, time and time again, because he knows Andy is counting on him being there. And time after time, Andy is right there when I need him. No question, no consideration that things would ever be otherwise.

That is why I peel back the sleeping bag.

The transfer of the wrist-band "baton" is getting slower now, but with lap times lengthening the changeover is less critical. Better safe than searching.

It's a smile and a wave from the Enable girls, then a hop over the drain at the end of the pit lane and out onto the track, zero to thirty miles an hour in a hundred metres. The first right hander is taken flat-out and pedalling, the apex long memorized. Then it's down into the sweeping left. The more I put on, the more I'll have to scrub off after though, so I drop my right leg and swoop through, holding the left edge of the track as I come into turn three. There's a floodlight here, and a car parked to highlight the apex with its beams, but I cautiously drop the speed back to below 30 to avoid running wide on the exit. Punching out the other side, it's up to 32 as I'm slingshotted up the following slope, taking the straight line through the chicane.

It's the hardest part of the circuit, the drag up through the next corner. I pass solo riders, now into the mentally destructive, metabolism-crippling early morning hours that require a stern will and infinite patience to crank your way through. I say hello, but it is muffled by the buff.

All weight onto legs as I wrench around the right-hander onto the back straight. It would be suicidal if I was doing more than 8 or 9 laps, but with these short stints, I can't hold back too much.

The headwind is vicious now, and I'm in the drops and as flat-backed as I can go, but spinning lightly. By this point I need more air than I can draw through the buff, and drop it off my nose, the sharp shock of it like cut crystal. My light reflects off highlights on legswarmers that piston in front of me, then slide off to one side.

I take the sharp inside line through the hairpin as the strongest rider from Fife showed me. It's one of the fastest ways to get around, but, more importantly, if you've picked up any hangers-on with no strength left, you can drop them here instantly. It's cruel, but every lap counts.

The buffer is already considerable, but we're only just over half-way. I won't feel comfortable until the last hour, when the caffeine I've pumped direct into my stomach lining has pulled out some of my fastest half hours so far as the morning mist burns off and I celebrate my final outing on the track by stripping down to shorts and a jersey and trying to beat Beaumont's three minute lap. I don't make it, but it doesn't matter. John and Nicola are there cheering me on, and so is everyone else, and we've done it. I pull in to give Andy the glory of bringing it home, the adrenaline still coursing through my veins. We pulled out almost 20 miles on our nearest competitors, and led from start to finish.

That a three-man team could win through 24 hours of racing versus four-men teams is surprising, and that we could do it so thoroughly is astonishing, but, truth be told, we won because we had no weak riders. None of us were as fresh as us at our best, but, similarly, none of us was significantly slower than the others. So we kept it up, lap after lap, rarely letting others pass whilst putting the other teams further into deficit when they fielded weaker riders.

We also had great support, John and Nicola paying us a visit when it mattered most, and making us as comfortable as guys spending thirty out of every ninety minutes flying around a track in the dark could be.

Most importantly, we had motivation. Friends and family had kindly donated over £1300 to Enable Scotland, the charity the event was in aid of, on the basis that we were going to ride our hearts out and, yes, win. As soon as I heard of the event, I knew we had the riders to win it, and we proved that.

We'll be back next year, to break the record.

Our record.