And up until this weekend had a real dislike for the course due to the rutted, rooted nature of the course and the toll it takes on the body. The previous 2 times I have raced an 8hr here I pulled the pin by the half way mark.
So the day began at stupid O' clock (2.00am) for the 3.5hr drive through the back roads to Lithgow. The scene through central Canberra was interesting with all the creatures of the night still out at 2.30am drinking. Here I am steeling myself for a 19hr day drinking black coffee and their still out drinking..... yup there was a small sense of self satisfaction there.
The rest of the drive was uneventful except for the fog around Goulburn which slowed the driving for about 1/2hr due to the limited visibility. I rolled into Lithgow just before 6ish, topped the car up with gas and then off to Macca's for another coffee and read the newspaper for 1/2 an hours before heading out to the course.
Driving into the start area, I pick a spot and start unloading the bike and setting my little table up. I line up 8 750 bottles for the 8hrs and throw one in the bike.
I set out 3 gel flasks with a mixture of Hammer Gel (vanilla and raspberry which is my new favourite) and Leppin shots.
I then sit in the car chilling before getting changed and heading over to the pre-race briefing. Once this is out of the way everyone heads off in the general direction of the start. I line up about 4 rows back and were off.
From my hit out the day before, I know how sore my ribs still are and just take it easy for the first portion. I'm quite happy swinging over on the fire roads and letting people through where they want.
At this point 3 riders I recognise get in front of me and I have a bit of a marker to chase, Dreggsy Grantly Butterfield and Kevin Wells.
After the first lap the results show I came through in 10th place, thought I had no idea where I was in the field. The time was about 34.30 I was feeling comfortable so just aimed to about that pace for as long as I could. On the next lap I got in front of Kev on one of the fire roads before he came screaming up on the next section of single track. At this point I had alot of pain in the ribs and to hear "Dave, get off the brakes!" as I'm standing trying to cushion all the vibration to them didn't go down well.
I over the next 3 laps I worked my way up into 5th place before stabilising there for the rest of the race. I was losing about 3 minutes a lap to 4th (not that I has any idea) but my lap times were consistent up until about the 1/2 way mark at 4hrs.
Here the times started blowing out to the 40min mark, they remained here right up until the last lap where I threw down a 38.5min lap. At about the 6hr mark I started playing mental math games to keep me amused to work out how many laps I had left, then started counting them down.
By this stage the body was sore, and hands had blisters from gripping and bracing the bars on all the downhills so I was glad at the end of the day to cross the line in about 8.15hr for 13 laps.
Analysis
Overall I was happiest about the pacing I managed for the race with a quickest lap of 34.5min and a slowest of 41.3mins. The race generated a whooping 560TSS with over just on 5000cals burnt. The quadrant analysis shows just how steep and punchy the climbs were in places with alot of time spent in quadrant II.
On another note I decided after the race I'm getting ride of XTR cranks. The entire race I never touched the dog. I spent the entire time in either the 22 or 32. The problem with this was the number of ratios that were unusable due to cross chaining, So I've decided to go to a double up front with a 27/40. I've order a FSA afterburner 386 crank as a trial. This will give me most of the gears I had previously with the triple but I should loose alot of the overlap.
I have a double on the hardtail with a 29/40 and gripshift for the front derailleur. This works really well as I can get all the gears with no rub at all.
But time will tell if it's going to work.
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