With an absence of willing mates to join me for this trip I hooked up with Ed Hood via Farkin, who was keen to join me for the driving so neither of us went to sleep at the wheel during the 3 hr drive home after a long day of racing :)
A perfect 22'C fine and sunny day greeted 450 odd punters, many of whom like us had travelled from Sydney or Canberra. This was a big crowd for a working week series race, clearly the new venue attracted many, myself included.
I wasn't here to race, just to test my pacing and fueling plan for Solo Nationals, which is 3 short weeks away. I was going to run with a bottle and alternating jersey pocket cups (Chis Eatough style) of either Banana Cookies, with small chunks of protein bar to get the macro nutrient mix just right, or Endura bars per hour. I didn't back off my training at all for the race, and just wanted to see how I would hold up...
The course was fantastic, flat and fast with flowy corners everywhere, and many a jump. With no hills the 9kms where done and dusted in under 30 mins every lap, which was bang on pace for my hourly refuelling plan (once every two laps), perfect! Even with 450 riders around, the course was never clogged, and I never got stuck, which amazed me as there was only one short section of firetrail, the rest was all single track, with a couple of double track sections.
I ran to 24 solo pace, with a hard limit on top end HR, I did not want to cook my legs with my final week of solo 24 training coming up this week, but I wasn't blundering around in nuetral either, aerobic was the plan, to ride fast, but well below 100 Mile Fling pace to ensure a fast anf full recovery, and I stuck to that pretty well. The relaxed attitude made for purely fun racing. I had time to slide the corners, huck the jumps and have a lot of fun. I kept the transitions fast (testing my solo 24 plan), under 10 secs most of the time (those cups proved to make for fast transitions!), with 30 seconds being the longest before the penultimate lap, as I took time out to skull a coke :)
My lap times and effort ended up pretty consitant, which was the plan, and I felt like I could keep hammering at the end, which was the plan (testing if this pace and fuel would be good for 24 hour solo), so I was rapped with that. I fell ready for Solo Nats now, bring it on!
It was Ed's longest race, he'd never done a single 8hr ride before, so it was pretty amazing he came 10th! I was pretty stoked for him, but at the same time, how could that bugger beat me on his first go at this stuff! ;)
The Stats:
| Distance | 160.0km |
| Time | 8:00 |
| Climb | 800vm |
| Speed | 19km/h avg |