BONKERS beginning to a bike packing race. After days of torrential rains, the weather continued on our first 200km of racing. 200 registrants. Depart Ljubiana Slovenia 7am and tried to keep my power reasonable, while failing to resist the temptation to match the pace of others around me. Does it matter if I am 20% faster in the first 50km of an 850km overnight race? Conditions deteriorated rapidly. Also ironic to fight dehydration during the deluge simply because I could not find any water fountains, or open bars/restaurants or gas stations on a Sunday. Eventually "broke into" a bar, and was able to refill my bottles ahead of CP1. Toughest part of the day was 1KM climb to CP1 in DEATH MUD. The kind that binds to everything, weighs a ton and is slippery as hell. Bruno the race director later told me the death mud section obliterated the field < all the scratches from day one occurred there. My intention was to ride through the night, and maybe get to one of the islands. Ha Ha. The racing conditions exhausted me, and I ended up with my shortest "first day" since starting ultra racing. Limped into Cerknica, found a guest house, and the owner made me wash myself off for 30minutes before I was allowed in. The extra fuff time getting in and out of accomodation added up to 1.5hrs... quite a bit in a race. Will sleep a few hours, and hopefully be on my way around 1:30am to climb to CP2 - and hopefully not in the rain. <My Garmin 1040 reset itself upon plugging into power, and lost my original first 11hrs of racing. No hidden files, backups, exception handling, even did a deep scan. Gone. Why does this still happen?> ⛰️ Črni hrib (440 m) • ⛰️ Mazovnik (450 m) • ⛰️ Roje (377 m) • ⛰️ Zadrenk (507 m) | 🌐 summitbag.com