Pavey Dakar Diary: day 2

With not one but two Paveys in Dakar this year, as veteran campaigner Simon is joined by son Llewelyn, the pair still has a hard battle ahead of them to complete the arduous 9295km race across South America.

With potentially the hardest day of the race over them, both father and son were feeling the worst of the 518km special section of the stage. Coupled with 50°C heat and hard terrain, both were suffering despite continuing strong results.

Simon Pavey

• Start position: 95th
• Finish Position: 81st

“I wasn’t riding very well this morning. When we got to a stretch of fesh-fesh early on you had to be on your game to ride it well and not make hard work of it and that’s what I did – make hard work of it. There were long ruts and hidden ruts and if you were making mistakes you were going to be slow and it was hard.

And that’s what it was like and that stuck with me all day, it was really hot and if you were using a lot of energy it had a lasting effect mentally and physically.

People were saying it was 50 degrees in the stage, which I don’t know if that’s true but if it’s ballpark then these are tough conditions.

There were lots of people who’ve been on drips tonight and I was the same – I had two.”

Llewelyn Pavey

• Start position: 84th
• Finish Position: 82nd

“I started out riding really well actually. It sounds quite silly but I’m quite scared of heights and up in the mountains there were some really big drops so for the first 70kms or so I was a bit scared and bit tentative.

Then after that it went more like what I’m good at really: it was fast, then there was sand and the bike felt awesome and I was catching people and passing them and I was really comfortable.

I had a little crash this morning which was as silly one, I lost a bit of skin but really I’d made up what felt like 15 or 20 places and I was comfortable. I wasn’t really pushing at all, just cruising along and then at the second check point where they stopped the stage I felt fresh like I’d only just warmed up.

Then we started out again, caught a few more people and there was a bit where a lot of people got lost but I got it right, which I was really happy with. I went the right way, I didn’t believe I’d gone the right way but I had!

By then we were 450kms in and I was starting to get a little bit tired. We got to this really fast set of sand whoops, it was just straight and you could see for kilometres. I was trying to attack them because they were big whoops and really hard work if you rode slow – for people in the UK it was like riding The Natterjack for 80kms.

I had a really big crash in there just because I was a bit tired. Not bad, just a silly crash and I ploughed my head into the ground, completely smashed my goggle lens, I lost my helmet peak and it rang my bell a little bit. But just a bit silly really, nothing dramatic.

Unfortunately that caused a really unlucky issue with the cables coming out the regulator rectifier. So the battery would die completely and I didn’t really know what the problem was. I spent ages trying to figure it out with my little electrical tester but just couldn’t source the issue.

With no power coming from the battery it was about twenty minutes before someone would give me a jump-start, in the last 40kms I had to get jump-started the whole way and that took an hour or more.

I’d drank all my water by that stage because I’d been stood in the hot desert for ages.

So I went from a really easy day where I was just cruising and enjoying myself to a day where I made it really hard for myself.”