Lobo Loco mini Titanic

saphena

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#1
Rally entrants vary from the fiercely competitive to the properly idle and I fall firmly into the latter camp.

My first attempt at a Lobo Loco rally resulted in my all time personal best continuing to be last place in the 2012 BBR. I don't care, I had an excellent day out on my bike and had fun discovering new places and new tricks which as far as I'm concerned is the whole point.

The Lobo Loco takes the concept of contactless rallying to a whole new level. Unlike the Jorvik, where riders are restricted to "Yorkshire", or the BBR - "Great Britain", Lobo Loco riders are restricted to "anywhere in the world". I chose a chunk of southern England. Everything is done by email and live bonus claiming is strongly encouraged. Using my Samsung phone and almost entirely without the assistance of spectacles each claim took between 30 and 60 seconds (depending on the level of detail required); I must have spent a good ten minutes of the eight hour rally engaged in emailing from the roadside.

I must admit that I had forgotten how little time eight hours is. When I finally got round to reading the rally book two days beforehand I devised an elaborate (although vague) plan involving about 1,000 miles of riding and collecting about a million points. On the day I made the classic rookie mistake of phaffing around at the start, followed by some serious messing about before getting down to some proper enjoyment of rolling open countryside giving views to the ocean before noticing that my satnav was desperately trying to get me to do a u-turn cos I'd sailed on past my destination some 20 miles ago.

I would have easily beaten my 2012 last place if only my last bonus wasn't two miles short. Oh well, DNF is way better than DNS and there's always next time.