This is a somewhat late post, because, well, there was a thing. I’m not sure if you noticed it. The Tour De France. It’s just a little bike race, but watching it kinda got in the way of some things, especially since I took a week off work and vanished to a hotel somewhere in a far-flung NSW wine region to watch the final epic week.
I really will get round to buying the proper images soon folks.
Anyway, round four of this year’s Shimano MTB GP took place a couple of weeks back at Mount Annan, home of the Australian Botanic Garden. Not the most obvious place for a mountain bike trail, an non-Sydneysider might think at first glance, but it’s one of the region’s better known and best managed trails. Rocky Trail as ever managed to put on a fantastic day of racing, the weather stayed resolutely cool and dry, and though I wasn’t plagued with the tyre issues of the previous round, not everything went according to plan..
Of course, I’d never ridden Mount Annan before, so first order of business on arrival was to get in a recce lap, with a radio adaptation of Waiting For Godot on the iPod. I found the trail to be not particularly hilly, not particularly technical and not particularly fast either. It’s very much a happy medium of all things, well suited to someone who can pedal well and keep their speed up through flowy corners. There was a bit of dampness still in the ground, making it slightly sticky, so it appeared it’d be a day of fast corner railing, and – with a healthy measure of doubletrack – a fair bit of passing.
The only technical bit I saw came at an A and B line split maybe halfway round, where a group of riders stood discussing their best option. On the left, a rocky drop into a compression, with a moderately tricky bump and bend to follow. To the right, a smoother descent, longer, but safer. On the warmup, I took the right hand option and found it quite unlikable, and trickier than it looked. Plan for the race: In laps one and two, take whichever has fewest people. Thereafter, stick to the A-line in all but impossible conditions. The track, it seemed, would suit me well, and I shouldn’t be overly penalised by my lack of local knowledge, though a prior visit or two may have helped a little.
On return to the transfer zone, I found starters already lining up in the straight and with me needing to grab extra water, ditch my iPod, jacket and legwarmers and grab a gel, I ended up quite a way back in the lineup as the gun went off. Experience and common sense suggested this wasn’t great, but the first km or two was to be an adjunct loop of tarmac and firetrail to let the field spread out before hitting the singletrack. This gave me a good opportunity to squeeze up the field and recover some of the lost trail space.
And into the singletrack we went. The first lap was of course a conga line with only a few opportunities to make places, but when we reached the A/B line split, the riders in front of me peeled right and I leapt at the left-hand A-line, making up quite a few places as a result. This seemed to slightly irk the rider who ended up behind me, and when we again squeezed into conga formation, he took a cheeky pass up the right hand side to rejoin his mate, without whom he’d been desperately lonely. I was fine with that, since with a km or so of double-trail coming up, I’d have plenty of time to get past.
And so I did, heading into the back section of the lap with the field slowly thinning out around me. Martin had, in a moment of trials-riding madness, laid out a particularly tricky winding tape maze towards the end of the lap, which resulted in a bit more queuing, but soon we were passing the frog pond, onto lap two and starting to settle into our rhythms.
A particular uphill log hop in the first half seemed to be causing a lot of trouble for the middle of the field. I don’t think I recall going through there without a rider dismounting or getting a foot down – which was odd because I hadn’t mentally flagged it as ‘technical’. Also the A-line section later in the lap nearly proved to be my undoing as I went through quicker and quicker on each subsequent lap until finally on lap three or four I collided with my own saddle in an arresting fashion and, somewhat chastened, continued the lap a little slower, a little wiser, and a little less likely to pass on my genes to a new generation. My times were very close to the half-hour per lap, with two laps dipping under (according to Strava, though not to race timing), so I was on for a comfortable eight laps in my four hours. This was good. I was having fun, the bike was behaving, the trail wasn’t trying to kill me particularly hard, there was no sign of cramp whatsoever and all vital signs were aligned for a fast final hour
However not all was to go as planned. Partway round lap six, almost three hours into the race and just after the drop-off, I heard my left pedal emitting a nasty GRAAAAAUNCH sound, along with some unhappy clicks and clunking noises, and shortly afterwards I felt the pedal part company with the bike altogether, dumping me onto the saddle again and halting my progress most unceremoniously.
My race was certainly over at this point
Looking down I saw only the bare spindle of the pedal, and leapt off the bike. Still attached to my foot was the pedal body itself.
I ride Crank Brothers Eggbeaters, and the Eggbeater 2 model on this bike has a single outboard bearing, with an inboard bushing. Clearly wear and tear had got to the single bearing and killed it, thought I prefer the explanation that I was simply putting too much raw power through it, and it gave up in sheer awe at the wattage.
There was no way this was field-repairable, so I bodged it back on and tiptoed my way round the lap to the finish, clamping my legs together like a chaste Victorian lady in order to stop further disintegration, and losing about 15 minutes off my previous lap time into the bargain. My day was over with a time of 3:24:32 and six laps. This still put me 24th in Male Solo Elite GP4, and 50th in overall GP4 Solo Male, so it wasn’t incredibly awful, and it was nice to be out on an airy open track after my previous two rounds in dense forest.
The fastest riders had been putting in laps of around 24 minutes, which was pretty spectacular, so I hung round the start-finish zone for a while to watch them come in, and saw Daniel McDonald fall over the line in 3:58:58 and, exhausted, decline another lap. A fantastic effort by Daniel, who could have gone back out and put another lap on the entire field, arriving with six minutes in hand over his nearest contender.
For me, then, the day was over. The seven hour riders were still grinding their way around and would do for at least three hours yet, with Ed McDonald of Target Trek putting in 17 laps to take the win by a full lap. I packed the bike into the van and started the tired trundle home to the Inner West, where a cold beer and a week off work filled with wine, cheese and televised road racing awaited me. I didn’t even clean the bike.
But I did order a new pair of upgraded Eggbeater 3 pedals, with the inboard and outboard needle bearings.
The final round is at Mt Stromlo in Canberra, in September, which I’m following up the day after with the Careflight Oaks Classic in the Blue Mountains. I’ll be aiming to obliterate last year’s ridden-with-the-flu placing, which should be achievable even with four hours of Stromlo in the legs. And of course, I’ll be on new pedals. Fun times!
