Despite the uncertainty beforehand, Sunday turned out ok. Better than that, it was a whole lot of fun! As I mentioned on Saturday, I wasn’t sure I could build enough motivation for continual 10.8 kilometre laps. Despite some hurdles along the way, things came along swimmingly.
Marathons and stage races normally involve early starts, and Enduro’s are no different. I met MTB Moorhouse at around 6am, loaded with a couple of patisserie snack for the drive north of Sydney. The drive passed quickly, as MTB Moorhouse recounted how he slipped out of the top 10 at the Elite Highland Fling two weeks previously – mostly from jamming the throttle open for too long and neglecting to eat and hydrate. Lesson learnt though – wait for him to unleash at next weekend’s Felt Alpine Assault at Falls Creek.
Enduro’s draw a diverse crowd, and most of this crowd were lined up waiting to pick up their start numbers at registration. Waiver forms and lines are a curse on Australian Mountain Biking. A necessary evil – but a curse nonetheless. Although there were free coffees, the registration affair took a while and ate into the race time. But I’ll make it clear – this didn’t bother me. A new Kona was given away to the person who brought the crappiest bike up. It was an interesting way to present a random prize. Not surprisingly, the guy who won it spun around on his new 29er hardtail pretty happily all day.
But back to the start – we all rode along the dusty entrance road and then turned around. That was the starting order. I was midfield, near Pista Pins Bateman, and so we did what we could to move up before hitting the singletrack. Awaba has great singletrack, but not so many passing opportunities. It will prove unpopular to say so, but most Australian semi-competitive mountain-bikers don’t like to be passed, nor do they cope with it well. It’s a problem that is always most evident at lap based Enduros. A lot of riders get overly sensitive. A large burly man shrieked like a schoolgirl when my bar end tapped his bars when he finally called me through.
So the first few laps unfolded slowly. I stopped to adjust my tyre pressures, to grab a fresh bottle from my pile on top of an esky, and for a nature break. Then there was a little less traffic and I had some good laps, until my chain broke around the 5 hour mark. Oh what a choice. Five hours is a pretty good session on the bike. And I was tempted to just… roll back down the trail. But instead I removed the broken link and got going again. I just took my sweet time. However it didn’t take long to get back in the swing of things on the rolling trails, and doing whatever I could to get away from other riders on the brief climb on the course. The trail wasn’t overly selective, so you had to move in the places you had an advantage.
As the day drew to a close, I had reports on sitting anywhere from second to fourth in solo mens. With time for another lap, there was little choice to go. Despite being certain that my previous lap would be my last, it ended up that 14 was going to be the lucky number today. I rolled around and ended up with third – my usual podium position, when I can make it there. That will be my third third-placing this year, along with a second, a fifth, a couple of sixth places, a seventh – and plenty a long way back from there.
So in the end I made it around, as did just about everyone. There were smiles everywhere, especially with the free beers being handed out to finishers. Who drank mine though?