Dungog 3 hour

I awoke this morning to the sound of mosquitos buzzing around my head as I slept in the swag on the Dungog common. They were veracious and it was a clear indication that it was time to get up.

We had the event centre set up the night before so the only thing to do before race start was get the track bunted. I got to ride a relaxed lap and hang a little bit of bunting tape and generally smile at the lovely sunny morning.

My knee was feeling pretty good so I decided I would actually race this round. I had the rigid single speed and discovered there were a few more rocks than I remembered while riding the anthem. It was awesome none the less.

My race didn’t last very long however. I got most of the way through the first lap and in a bold (some would say ridiculous) overtaking move, I skipped through a B-line and arrived at a gnarly rock causeway travelling at warp 4. I was completely out of control as I was pin balling off every rock in the surrounding suburb. The end result was a flat tyre. I actually pinched the rim so hard that the rim went all the way through the tyre and sent sealant hosing everywhere. It was the first ever ride on that tyre and its heading for the junk bin.

So I did the walk of shame back to timing and hung out until all hell broke loose when the storm arrived. It was bad enough that we had to call the race off as the lightning was raining down everywhere and the idea of riders on exposed ridge lines was too dangerous to keep everyone riding.

I was pretty disappointed that the race ended the way it did but there isn’t much you can do about the weather. At least everyone got to see how cool the trails are in Dungog.

HuRT trail finished

Last night I think I finished everything for the HuRT. The Cue sheets are done and the final GPS files are posted. Of course, it didn’t take long until I realized I had made all manner of mistakes. I guess that is what you get when you stay back after work from 6-9:30pm on a friday night trying to get it done.

I don’t have a windows PC and up until recently, I haven’t had a mac with enough grunt to run a second OS. So I just installed topofusion on a work computer to play around with. I still haven’t found anything better to work with to find distance markers for cue sheets.

So this morning I am trying to fix those final few mistakes and then I can head to Dungog this evening for tomorrows race and look forward to a cold beer on a hilltop.

Last minute cramming.

This morning was spent writing a speech for the Chemmart conference I will be at next week. I’ve been putting off doing this for weeks and finally got around to it the day before I fly out. I will be talking about my Trans-OZ ride. Attempting to distill all the preparation and effort that went into the trip into a couple of minutes. Talk about difficult. For a ride where hours and hours went by without a single thing happening, there is still a hell of a lot left to talk about.

If only my knee was in better shape and I could have gone on the HMBA BFO social ride today. By all accounts, Pokolbin has the best trails ever.

 

More Gundog trail work

More trail work at Dungog common today to get ready for the 3 hour next weekend. There was a pretty nasty pinch turn at the end of a high speed descent that was destined to blow out so we re-jigged things a little to try and minimise brake ruts. It has come up relatively well but will really benefit from some wheels over it next weekend.

I’m super excited about this race. So much so, that I might just ride it on the single speed (knee dependent).

Avoiding the Psycho Horse Beast

Brad and I have long debated the legalities of access through one of our favourite trails sections near Awaba. It has some amazing flowing single track, chunky climbs and unfortunately a crazy horse riding local that claims ownership over the area. She has put up private property signs all over the area which extend outside the fence line and are adjacent to a public access privately owned reserve.

Having been on the receiving end of her vitriol in the past, I didn’t want to expose others to the same situation and so spent some time trying to find an alternative route to use in the HuRT.

Google earth is a great resource although it can also be the source of much false hope. There were several fire trails that looked liked they would take me to exactly where I wanted to go but from satellite photos, you can’t see the fences and private property signs that closed down every avenue.

Eventually I had no other choice than to retrace a past missed turn which I knew would take us around the area in question but would add a hurty hurty hurty hike a bike.

Funnily enough, when I got to the top it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered and it came out at the level of the road gap leaving a sensational descent through to Awaba. So the HuRT file is now finished and now I just need to sort the cue sheets and update the website a little and it will be game on!

Playing late on a school night

As we pushed up the GNW towards Sugarloaf Range Road, the sun slowly set over the valley in a magical finale to a sensational day. We had yet again drastically underestimated how long a ride was going to take and with one car parked in Killingworth carpark and the other at the Pines in the Watagans, we were pretty committed to getting this one finished.

Earlier in the day I had pondered taking lights for this ride. I don’t really know why I didn’t in the end, but I was starting to regret it now. Thankfully B-rad had a single set of Ay-ups on his helmet which was going to have to be enough. We rode side by side along the range road as I leeched his light and had several interesting moments when greeted by sudden darkness while approaching downhill waterbars at speed.

We fumbled around looking for a neat bit of single trail across the ridgeline and finally found it with Brad leading and me following. This soon failed miserably as I needed to memorize what was ahead on the trail between his light and my front wheel as it plunged into darkness between the two. The less you could see, the faster you had to ride or you got dropped and left alone in the dark.

Swapping positions meant I was riding in my own shaddow but at least I wasn’t being dropped so it was good enough for me. Coming down the old Killingworth downhill trail was an absolute riot. Everyone needs to ride a rigid bike with no lights down that trail in the dark. I hit so many rocks it was ridiculous and decked it once when I rode straight into a large branch in the middle of the trail that I had no idea was even there. God I laughed.Having sledged anyone who rode the firetrail instead of single track on this descent earlier in the day, I didn’t have much choice but to suck it up and get to the bottom.

Somehow, despite every indicator suggesting I was going to break some bones, We made it to the bottom, to the car and eventually home. Far later than I had anticipated but feeling simultaneously completely alive and yet half dead after the toughest 75ks I’ve ever ridden. Gee it felt great to be in the great outdoors again.

Is there a metaphysician is in the house?

B-rad and I are starting to run low on time to finish mapping the HuRT. We only have two sections left to finish but it’s a sneaky race and has arrived rather quickly. With recent rainy weather and my bung knee, there hasn’t been any mapping done in the last few weeks. On the long drive home from Canberra after the Scott, amongst many metaphysical discussions, we came up with a solution…….. put a GPS tracker on AK.

He’s bound to ride some unreal trail (since that is his middle name) and he might as well be mapping for us while he is doing it. We gave him some broad directions like “Start at this set of powerlines and ride some cool stuff and end up in Wallsend”. He just grinned and nodded. You could already see the cogs ticking over in his mind calculating the exact route he would follow and measuring the amount of HuRT he could dish out in that space of time. Rest assured that his route through Killingworth will be simultaneously the greatest and worst moment of your life.

B-rad and I will be riding from the Pines to Becks Rd after the club round this sunday. This is going to feature a few additional sections like Rock Lobster and Keiths. Keiths is one of those love hate tracks. It is amazingly techy and tight single track and with fresh legs on, its a whole world of fun and laughter. In the middle of the night with 220k’s in the legs, it is going to rip your heart out and feed it to the leeches. I’m preparing to be a blubbering mess when I have to ride this in the dark all cold and alone.

I also started playing with topofusion which looks like a really neat tool that lets me edit the trail in all manner of nifty views and schtuff.  I’ll be needing to spend some time with it this afternoon in order to correlate some distance measurements to go with the cue sheets. Hopefully the cue sheets and the final GPS trail will be available in a little over a week so people can start checking out likely bivvy spots on google earth. Hint: You can’t beat Barraba Trig – Best campsite ever.

PS: I’m well aquatinted with hyperbole so don’t take my dire warnings about the life and death struggle this trail represents too seriously…………. Leeches can’t eat your heart……… if your riding fast enough.

PPS: I set up another blog site for the HuRT to make the info a little easier to digest. Check it out here if you haven’t already.

Scott 24

Gee it was hard sitting on the sidelines and not getting to ride this one. I didn’t’ think I was going to miss riding Stromolo but it really got me longing when race morning dawned.

I got to see the other side of 24 hour racing on the other hand. I spent most of the weekend hanging out in Ed’s pit as he turned himself inside out in pursuit of Jason English. While the final score card looked like another Jason English white wash, the reality is that it was far from so. Ed only trailed Jason by less than 10 minutes the whole night with Jason managing to find another 10 minutes around dawn.

While still riding like his cool calm, collected self, it was the first time I have seen Jason clearly racing hard in a 24 hour. Normally he just looks like he is on cruise control. Ed really made him work for it and if a few key moments had panned out differently, Ed would have been a whole lot closer.

Personally, I think Ed is the heir apparent to Jason’s 24 hour empire and I can’t wait to see how things pan out at next years 24 nationals.

One left standing

Why is it that when you have more and more bikes, less and less of them are actually in serviceable condition at any given time? I figured sharing the wear amongst a few bikes would greatly decrease the amount of wear on components and everything would take longer to fall apart. Unfortunatey this doesn’t appear to be the case as I am again left with only a single working bike (the single speed of course). Trotter is getting the rear wheel rebuilt after popping yet another spoke and then its brakes are sucking air so are getting some new seals as well. The race bike doesn’t actually have  a wheelset or brakes at the moment which is pretty much OK because I haven’t been racing but i’ll hopefully remedy that soon.

I haven’t even thought about putting the parts that I stole for Trans-Oz back on the road bike yet. They are all there, they just aren’t bolted back onto the bike. So when it came time to pick the car up from servicing, there was no other choice than spinning along in the rain on a 32×20 mountain bike –  so very very slow and so very very wet.

Perhaps I should stop lusting after new bikes and spend a bit of time sorting out what is already in the shed.

More Dungog stuff

I got off work today at lunch time and headed to Dungog to lend a hand with some trail prep prior to the 3 hour. Yet again the trusty whipper snipper was broken out and half a kilometer of single track emerged out of hibernation. Thankfully, the roundup had done its work already and it was relatively easy going. There had certainly been some rain over the last 2 days with the brooks now looking like creeks and water running out of the hillside everywhere, at least there isn’t much topsoil there so it won’t hold onto the water for too long.

In other news, I cut the alfine out of the wheel to send back to zee Germans today. I could have broken out the spoke wrench and carefully extracted the wheel but instead used my pent up frustration and a pair of pliers to get the job done 10 times quicker and ensure I have no possible means of being tempted to re-build it again.

Scott 24 this weekend. I’ll be wandering around with a beer and a smile and not suffering the inconvenience of having to actually race a bike. It should be awesome.