Well its in the middle of the Red Center of Australia three hours by Qantas to the airport. In global terms its right next to Uluru (Ayers Rock) but that's actually about 500km down the road and I'm going there on the way back.
So I am here for a pretty cruisy week of mountain bike racing. We have 7 stages over 5 days starting today with a 40km in the morning and a hill climb in the afternoon.
Stage 1:
This morning was great -started off on a the Alice Velodrome and headed out of town. A mixture of rocky single track short sharp hills and desents and "baby head" sized sharp angular boulders. After navigating the "Hell - road" a 5km section along a fence line that was particularly rough with a good measure of Sandy creek beds thown in then things got a little smoother and faster.
All done with a sprint down to the Desert Park to finish off with.
Critical Stats:
Winning time 1:46
Tim's Time 2:30:44. Place 77 of 230ish.
Ok all for now will try get some photos from the hill climb a very short 20% grade bit of fun this afternoon.
Stage 2:
A short and sharp climb up Anzac hill. With times ranging from 2+min to 45 sec I was happy to get 1:09 and a good burn in my legs and I placed a little better than in the other 2 stages (57th) so it goes to show that most mountain bikers are a little chunkier than me. A little bit of a fun stage.
Stage 3:
47km of dirt roads, sandy corners and creeks, and a whole heap of sweet switch-back filled single track. Awesome. Riding through and over boulder strewn red dirt there was so much twisting track that at one stage I could have sworn I was stuck in a mobius strip. I planned my water strategy well today, pre-leaving a bottle at each water drop so no dripping camelpack today or extra water carrying. I went a bit quicker than yesterday and finished 67th, So now I am up to 72nd overall. Or maybe 10 people ahead of me just got punctures. We’ll see how we go in the epic 90km tomorrow – rumour has it that the section of corrugated dirt has been tarred since last year. Let’s hope. We loaded up our bikes at 4pm into a road train. So now over a million dollars worth of bikes are being transported to the Ross River Station for tomorrows start. At that stage we think they’ll be worth a whole lots less.
Time for pasta.
2 comments:
This is sounding fun, but I'm missing the beer tent stories!
Or do the ozzies not know how to host something like Dirtopia ;)
jislaaikit you are a hacker. pains me to read this cr@p. is that a tar road in the picture for the hillclimb with a million traffic cones. that would be a slalom course at dirtopia.
what's a leaky camelbak?you buy yours at sportsman's warehouse?NALGENE bladder is the way forward
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