What a killer race, I've never considering quitting during an event before, but during this gruelling event, I did for the the first time.
Dan, Adam and I started the event planning to stick together and complete it, not compete it. We certainly stuck to the plan, stopping to take photos and have food breaks to chat, it was nice to cruise the event socially rather than kill ourselves with teeth grinding and miss the beauty of the Otways we had travelled so far to see.
The course started with a cruisy 5kms to the base of the range, where it went immediatley to 20% grade climbing, the entire field off the bikes and pushing for 20mins to the top of the steep section, where I stopped to take a nice shot looking back down on Apollo Bay and the Great Ocean Road. Back on the bikes for 20mins more climbing, but at least we could pedal this one, then a screaming 72km/h descent, ear to ear grins all round and feeling great, the descent did ofcourse now mean we were at the bottom of the great dividing range, and we had to go up and over that to get to Forrest... 90 odd minutes of climbing ensued... much grimacing and we took a couple of nice stops for food to make the trip enjoyable. The flora here is pretty special, lots of lush ferns and it's a green as a tropical rain forrest, which surprised me gievn we are at the Southern most point of the Australian mainland.
Then came some of the hairiest descending I've done for a long time, steep as hell, and huge ruts where you had to ride a 6" wide ridge, or risk falling into the rut and becoming worm food. I wore my fear on my sleeve and rode the brakes pretty hard here while Dan and Adam took off, giggling like a pair of school girls :) At the bottom of one fast descent was a huge mud pool, I hit it thinking "this will be slippery, I bet I crash", all that positive talk ensured I did, with a big splat! Dan and Adam stopping to have a good laugh :D
Several hard climbs followed and I felt OK, but Dan was obvioulsy feeling better, he climbed away ahead of Adam and I and by the time we descended into to Forrest, I had lost sight of him, figuring he'd gone onto the next stage I tried to catch up, unbeknown that he had pulled into transition at Forrest to wait for Adam and I (a mere 10 seconds prior to my arrival and 1 race position)... d'oh!
The next stage was the Magellan Super Loop, and I really wished I stopped to take some photos in here, I've never seen so many logs to ride or double jumps in the one place, this was seriously fun! I was like a kid in a candy store, jumping this and manualing that, I totally forgot to save any energy, halfway through, fatigue started to set in, and every jump went from fun air time, to gruelling and painful to go over, the further I rode, the worse I felt. The stage named "cut yer bars" was filled with tight trees to skim through, I didn't, I seemed to clip everything in sight, crashing heaps of times, just too tired to concentrate... I went into survival mode and just rode slowly to the end of the stage, crawling through the timed descent stage, something I would usually revel in.
Finally I crawled into Forrest at the end of stage 2 and figured, "screw stage 3, I'm done". I really thought I should quit here, I'd had enough, and so had 238 other entrants, these were the smart ones, as they pulled out of the race, that's 33% of the field, it really shows how tough this event is when 1/3 of the field DNF.
I bought a Coke from a stall there and sat on the grass a wreck, Kylie arrived and convinced me to finish the race, knowing I would regret it if I DNF'd. I took her advice, and chased the Coke with some Endura Opti and started to feel good again. I switched from power bars to gels and decided to have a crack at the final stage.
This stage was crazy hard, 20kms, and they took me a massive 2 and half hours, that's damned slow going. It seemed to have no flat terrain at all, I was either cautiously decending steep downhills or pushing my bike up insanely hard hills, and so was everyone else around me, it was incredibly tough terrain for the final 20kms in a 100km race and I never felt like I was riding with any rythm at all. Halfway through, with 10kms to go, a stick got caught in my derailer and ripped it clean off... I wasn't too miffed though, afterall I was hardly getting to pedal anyway, so I just continued on, rolling the downs and walking the ups.
As I came out of the final section, aptly named "sledge hammer", I bumped into Adam as he was going in. He looked like I felt, exhausted :) We stopped for a while and chatted and the medical guys there wanted Adam to have a sit, so while he sat, I tried to fit my replacement derailuer hanger, eventually I got the hanger on, but the old one was was bent badly and could not be taken off, so I gave up and just sat there, defeated.
Eventually the medical guys at the checkpoint convinced Adam to give the final 20kms a miss and skip out with me, straight the to the finish, he was pretty reluctant, not wanting to DNF, but common sense took over and we headed off to the finish. It was 5kms of mostly downhill, and a pleasant cruise to the end (albiet with no drive line :)), and the finish line was a heavenly sight, I pushed my broken bike across and we'd made it through the toughest race I've done yet!
The crew:
| Jason | Giant Trance |
| Adam | SC Blur |
| Dan | Turner Flux |
The Stats:
| Result | 308th out of 638 (48%) |
| Distance | 106km |
| Time | 9:15 |
| Climb | 2850vm |
| Speed | 13.8km/h avg, 72.1km/h max |
| Power | 179W avg |
| Date | 3/02/2007 |