Sydney 24 hour Mountain Bike Race

16th to 17th April 2005

Part 1:

Are you feeling the post-IM blues? Is the thought of riding to Waterfall again making you saddlesore? If so, then here is some food for thought...

imagine...

A 10k off road loop featuring climbs, descents, moguls, jumps, dropoffs, and single track; up to 6 riders in a team, 24 hours to complete as many laps as you can. The N-ZO Sydney 24 Hour MTB Event is one of the best organised events I've ever taken part in: there's a timing team typing race numbers into a computer as you finish each lap, and there's even a tent with 5 computers where you can check your team's position and individual lap times! I've just had a hot shower, there's a live band playing, I'm tucking into a big bowl of pasta from the excellent Bush Fireys food station and I'm hanging out in the campsite with my courier mates. Does life get much better?

The riding is amazing, especially in the dark, our team is sitting in 4th place in the 4 man category and I can honestly say that I haven't had this much fun with my clothes on in a very long time! Something tells me that I'll be doing plenty more riding on knobbly tyres in the off-season! Oh yeah, did I mention it's really good for core strength and bike handling skills too? As a bonus I just won a cool N-ZO shirt in the track stand competition for staying still on my bike with one hand off the bars ;-)

One of the great things about being sponsored by Inner City Cycles is that they know their mountain bikes too; especially useful if you don't know a hard-tail from a dual! When you do something as different as this you are on a huge learning curve and good advice is invaluable. Thanks to Ainsley, Russ and Llewellyn for going well beyond the call of duty to get me + bike onto the start line!

Thanks especially to 'Dangerous' Dave Tickler for lending me his sexy Stump Jumper to ride and also Jana, Kristian, Charlotte and Pete for lending me the lights! Believe me, its nice to see what's ahead when you are riding a rough trail at speeds of up to 50kph!

Part 2:

Our lack of co-ordination and absence of a support crew became a big factor during the night. We lost time to the better organised teams but managed to keep a rider on the course for 90% of the time. Our team slid to 13th place but some inspired daylight riding in the morning moved us back up for a 10th place finish with a total of 38 laps.

Our riders were Tim, Ruido 329, Bado 332 and myself 398 (but riding for Adrian Kingsell as a substitute) and rode under Team Boris as a tribute to Jason 929, a courier and mountain biker who is really seriously ill :-(

If you think that racing an Ironman is the ultimate test of endurance then you might need to rethink. The winner of the solo category completed 35 laps; that's over 350km of riding, OFF ROAD and half of it in the dark! 3rd placed solo was Steve, another courier (who was so well organised that he even had a spare battery to lend me when I had run ouf of light) rode the whole thing on a SINGLE SPEED !!! You might like to bear that in mind next time you snap a gear cable!

Photos to follow soon. Click here to see some other upcoming events.