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| Reason 1 to love Mountain Biking |
I have a confession to make. I love Mountain Biking! I love being out in the bush, no cars, just trails and tranquility. But I have a problem, the mountain component of mountain biking causes me a great deal of discomfort and fear. Fear of tumbling down a hill, flying off the side of the trail into nothingness, these are the thoughts that go through my head as I ride, which makes many rides uncomfortable to say the least. But I really want to be out there, so I needed to find a way to solve this problem. My solution - entering a 24 hour mountain bike race at Fox Creek!
Ok, on a scale of 1 to 10 of daft ideas I've had, this one probably rates up there with the time I built a raft out of rotten wood as a kid, or forgot to hold onto the saddle of a cantering horse. In my defense, I was only planning on doing the 6 or 12 hour version as part of a team (stop rolling your eyes), but Mr Carl pointed out that if we were going to haul all our gear up to Fox, we might as well go the whole hog. So 24 hours it would be.
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| Reason 2 to love Mountain Biking |
With the two of us committed, the first thing we needed to do was find some willing victims teamies. We first approached Captain Bob and Brett (aka Nutella Bob), but some serious mileage last year had meant that Captain Bob was relegated to managerial duties, and Brett was facing impending parenthood, so we needed some new blood.
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| The Experienced Anthony |
Our first recruit was an old work colleague, Anthony, who we knew did a bit of racing in Alice Springs. He wasn't too hard to convince and the three of us went out for our first training ride. Now we are all groundwater modellers and spend most of our time working with computers. So naturally we relied on tech to help us navigate. This appeared to be a major disadvantage as garmin thought it needed to find a road for us to u-turn on when we missed a turn by 50 meters or so. The road it found was 5 km down a hill. So u-turn we did and went 5 km back uphill. We clocked up almost 600 m climbing in 20 km (strava file here) and earnt all the beer and pizza that Anderson Hill Winery could provide!
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| Our Compass - Meg |
After that somewhat epic training ride, we decided our final teamy needed a sense of direction. Someone who might have a bit more practical experience in the world beyond computers. As it turns out, working for the government has it's advantages, lots of people are keen environmentalists and ride bikes. They also have people that go outside and deal with the real world on a regular basis! Without stretching the truth too much, we persuaded one of these "field hydrogeologists", Meg, to join us. Little did she know what she was getting into!
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| Beer and Grins! |
As it turned out, there were a few other people at work who were planning on riding the Dirty Weekend, and some of them even had a passing familiarity with the trails at Fox. Taking advantage of this sudden influx of knowledge, we organised a training ride. This was a relatively successful event, with no one getting too lost and everyone lining up for beer and pizza at the end of the ride.
One thing that was becoming increasing evident to me was that one of my (many) weaknesses were downhill switchbacks. I'd finally mastered the uphill versions, but the downhill variety seemed to require a level of speed and flow that I wasn't comfortable with.
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| Super Awesome Coach! |
But I had a secret weapon. An absolutely brilliant mountain bike teacher! She took me out to some switchbacks I had failed to ride in a previous event and patiently guided me through how to ride them. Then she stood and cheered me on as I cautiously inched my way down, in what was probably one of the most horrendously ridden switchbacks in the history of mountain biking. But I rode it. It's really hard to give up when someone else is so convinced you can do it!
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Reason 3 to love Mountain Biking
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So, after a few more training rides, progressively getting less lost each time, we, the team appropriately called Educated Guesswork, were ready. Or at least that's what we thought.
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| We even practiced with the tent! |
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