What a sweet team name. I was laughing my head off this morning when that entry came through for the Paterson Kona 24.
I hereby declare I will buy a beer down at the hotel on friday night for the team which I subjectively judge to have the best team name. So far, this one is a real winner 🙂 (If i’m smart, I’ll pick a soloist so I don’t have to cough up so much beer….)
One lap was all I could manage at the club XC race today. I just wasn’t feeling it. I was dropped within half a lap by the bunch and just didn’t have any top gear at all. My heart wasn’t in the game, my head wasn’t in the game and my legs weren’t in the game…. So i pulled the pin and DNF’d. Glad I did because there is no sense in pushing yourself when your not really enjoying it. I am sure the stoke will be back later in the year but it was certainly somewhere else today.
This afternoon I took the Mrs for a walk around Paterson. We took the GPS with us and mapped out the course which is now linked on the event website. My rough guess as to the track length had always been about 13 k’s and it turns out it is almost precisely 13 k’s.
Towards the top of the climb, wifey just looked at me and said “the riders are going to kill you!”. She may well be right. There is no mistaking that there is a big arse hill in the middle of the course and it is going to hurt a few people but at least you get to descend for about 3k’s to help make up for it.
There is only a couple of hours until entries open. If I hadn’t spent 3.5 hour wandering around in 40 degree heat, I may well have a sleepless night.
The most recent Paterson meeting was on Tuesday night. Everything is on track and humming along nicely. In hind sight, it probably wasn’t very smart of me to schedule that particular meeting on my 8th wedding anniversary. Thankfully I have a very understanding wifey who is also OK with the fact that we are cutting short a weekend in Sydney to see Sufjan Stephens at the Opera House on friday,  in order to attend another meeting on Saturday morning. I’m a lucky guy 😀
With the help of Sammydog, the online registration is now setup and will open on monday morning. Click here to see the entry page
I updated the event website and spent a long, long time (far, far to long) trying to figure out why a link wasn’t working. It seems I was foiled by an errant “/” which had slipped in under the radar. I hate online html thingos, it does my head in.
I feel totally worn out at the moment. I’m not recovering from hard rides, I’m not getting enough sleep and as my dear mother would say; i’m “burning the candle at both ends”. So I’m having a week off the bike.
Besides, all my bikes need working on at the moment so it gives me a little bit of time to fix them up so they are rideable. I still haven’t got the alfine working correctly. Every time I work on it, it is 10 pm at night and I tired, or I am rushing at 6am in the morning before going on a ride. I am sure it isn’t actually hard to get the thing working correctly, its just that I keep making stupid mistakes (like not tightening one of the bolt up axles) and then struggling to figure out why the cable tension has all gone to crap. Â Sleep, time and a little patience will prevail.
Saturday morning saw the Mclovin 1000 coghead ride. 1000m of climing in about 30 odd k’s. It hurt me. I was going OK to start with but started to blow up at the end and was glad when it was finished.
On saturday afternoon we did some more wandering around Paterson with the Weston One Speed Wheelman. Absolutely sensational. The third leaf of the clover is now complete and is the best bit of trail to date. Not to mention that it took about 2 hours and a couple of swings with a machete to find and clear it. I’ve never seen somewhere easier to build trail and the  cows have lead us to some of the most beautiful places the property has to offer. Including a wonderful little A,B & C line that we have dubbed Sesame St.
We are going to need to do some benching, digging and sculpting along one descent, but if we are able to build 13 odd k’s of trail and only have to dig for around 100 meters, then its a massive win. The layout of the event centre is starting to take shape also. The loop through the camping ground and transition is taking shape along with the location of all the facilities.
I’ve got a meeting about the race on Tuesday with the organizing committee and again on Saturday so expect an announcement on entires fairly shortly. Oh, and tell everyone you know about the race. Its going to be one hell of an event.
Sunday saw a token appearance at the DH build day. By the time I had walked to the top of the downhill trail, I was ready for a nap and since all my tools are laying out beside the XC trail, I didn’t have anything to work with. I borrowed what tools I could, laughed at XC riders when prompted and generally just got in the way. It was a good morning however I needed a 4 hour nap to get over it afterwards.
I receieved a mid week email letting me know that Mick was coming to Newcastle for a couple of days for work and his bike was coming along. We quickly made plans for a thursday evening ride through glenrock and a friday night ride along the dog track.
It was freakin awesome. It was the first time I had ridden the big dog at night and it was great fun. It’s clearly time to retire the Racking Ralphs on the anthem however. Diabolical was the only way to describe them. Somehow I kept everything upright until about 2 k’s from the end when I entered a corner a little hot, discovered a huge rut, fired the ejector seat and was propelled in an elegant arc into the green leafy undergrowth. The green leafy undergrowth which it turns out was hiding a veritable punji pit of sharp, pointy, angry sticks. Somehow I managed to bounce off most of them like a ballistics gel mannequin in a myth busters episode however I did recieve some awesome prominent scarpes a little reminiscent of Bruce Lee in enter the dragon.
The tunnel is pretty boring at night with lights on, perhaps next time I’ll give it a go with nothing but the strobe mode on the magicshine….. that will liven things up a little.
New chain arrived today for the secret speed……. 96 links. Exactly 1 link short. Damn it!
A measly 85 k’s on the roadie and I am smoked. All was going reasonably well until I hit Mt Sugarloaf and then the wheels came off. There was nothing left and I could barely even turn the pedals over on the link rd on the way back home. Thankfully it turned out I also had a flat tyre so I am going to blame the equipment rather than my legs today and see what happens next time I try and climb ‘the loaf’ with some air in my tyres.
I also de-rooted my cable routing for the alfine. Its amazing how removing a series of tight radius bends in a cable magically fixes crappy shifting. It is as smooth as butter now. I am just waiting on a new chain and it will be good to roll, since the old chain is horrendously worn and isn’t playing nicely with the new rear cog.
Today I managed to break myself, B-rad and AK. Â All it took was a single lap of the track in the heat and we were starting to feel zee burn. Then another 5 hours wandering around with sharp cutting tools put the nail in the coffin. We attempted to rehydrate with a quiet ale at the pub however I am pretty sure it will take several more before I even begin to make up for what was lost.
We made some big changes to our plans for the race track. The old route had some pretty intense climbing along with a seriously steep, fast and in places – sketchy descent. Â The descent never seemed to be long enough to pay back for all the climbing it took to get there. There were also some legitimate concerns that it was going to kill someone. We could all see a major accident waiting to happen.
In short, it was going to hurt…. lots! Instead, we have taken plan B which sees a slightly more laid back climb (although it is still going to hurt) but we intersperse it with some really nice traverses (read: they are actually flat). We also added a significantly longer descent and then a host of extra single trail along the bottom of the hill in the most level section of the property. It should make for a challenging but extremely rewarding bit of trail.
The mix of single track and fire road will be just about perfect for a 24 leaving lots of room to pass and plenty of places to eat and drink. We just need to get our dedicated single track excavators in to tidy up the trail because it is seriously green at the moment. There are so many momentum killing rocks hidden all over the place that you can’t keep your speed up and the trail all but disappears at points meaning you need to ride with one eye on the look out for flagging tape and the other looking for hidden rocks.
The newest piece of single track to be added to the course has been named “bovine inspiration” and Brad has nominated the local trail builders (cows) for the 2011 IMBA trail builder of the year award (does that even exist?). Cows seem to have a natural affinity for grade reversals and a knack for following contour lines which is just uncanny. They even seem to understand the need to link places of interest, with their trails almost always leading to somewhere useful.
So the current bits of trail that actually have names are:
Dead bird
The plumbers line
Bovine inspiration
The A-K line
More mildly amusing track names to come……
It is done.
The single speed is no longer a single speed (for a while at least). I had the wheel built at Gateshead using Stans Arch rims and DT swiss comp spokes (and red nipples!). It looks great. Thankfully there weren’t any scales for me to put it on at home since the whole package including tyre would likely weigh somewhere North of 2.8-3.0kgs (the hub is around 1.8kgs).
I used a Stans rubber rim strip to convert to tubeless and somehow managed to get a very heavily abused Ardent to inflate on the first attempt with a track pump. No soapy water, no swearing, just a lot of pumping and a few sealant geysers where old holes in the tyre carcass slowly sealed. I don’t intend to run the Ardent on the rear long term, however it was the only spare tyre I had kicking around that I though was even a remote chance of sealing. The much newer Aspen that was lying next to it has a sizeable cut in the sidewall which looks to have ended its tubeless days.
The Alfine 11 is installed and so far all appears to be going well. It took a little bit of head scratching to get it set up correctly after I made an error with a lock ring and was left with a hub full of neutral as the sprocket freely spun independently to the gearbox. It didn’t help that I was rushing things to try and have it ready for yesterdays coghead ride. In the end I decided it was late, I was tired and it could wait another day. Hindsight tells me it was definitely the correct decision.
At this point, I don’t have any ride time on the bike other than a lap or two around the block so I won’t prematurely offer opinions about it. I’ll leave that up to subsequent posts. I’ll definitely be taking it for a spin today however – lets just hope I like it!
Another 9 hours in the saddle today. Probably only 7 hours of pedal time though, there was quite a bit of gas bagging 🙂
The cogheads did Killi and we had an 0545 meet for the ride out there. There was an abbreviated dog track, some fire trail and a ride through the back of West Walsend for the meetup.
Killi is just amazing. The flow, the speed, the sheer joy of hanging it all out through bermed corners and linking multiple sweeping bends through the trees was what made so many people fall in love with Killi in the past. The grins haven’t gone anywhere, there still there if you go looking.
After we did a tour of the best parts of Killi, the cogheads arrived back at the main car parking area and we bumped into B-rad, Rod and Dave who were just heading out. Since i didn’t have any pressing engagements, I decided to tag along as we did a big loop back through West Walsend, out the back of Seahampton and eventually climbing to the top of sugarloaf.
At this point, Brad had an ace up his sleeve and showed us some fantastic single trail that noodles across the ridge-line. At this point, it only gets as far the power-line easement however there is a fair chance it will link up somewhere and then it will be on for young and old.
I had just been thinking last night that I hadn’t actually ridden the old downhill trail in the right direction. I’ve climbed up it to many times and now we were at the top and there were countless trail options below us to smash at. Somewhere amongst the warren of trail, I took a different turn to the others and came across some fantastic ledgy, rock strewn trail. Now this is how XC descents should be made! It then occurred to me that an afternoon of shuttles would be a sensational idea. If anyone is keen to have a dozen runs at this masterpiece, then let me know and we’ll have a party
From there, a seocnd tour of Killi was undertaken before we parted ways and I headed for home. I took the asphalt home in order to fend off a rapidly approaching bonk. I have no idea how far I rode but somewhere near 100k’s would be a reasonable bet.
A great day to be sure and best of luck Dave and Rod in the Ottway if I dont’ see you beforehand.
Happy trails!
the unknown rider 