Stage 3 Stronie Slaskie to Bardo, 67 kilometres What happened? The race left Stronie Slaskie in beautiful weather and after a ‘neutral’ lap of this beautiful town, headed up, and up, and up, on a 13 km gravel climb, and into border country. The race then turned technical, inching through muddy singletrack made of roots […]
Sudety MTB Challenge 2014 Stage 1 – Touring Stronie Slaskie
Stage 1 – Tour de Stronie Slaskie What happened? After yesterday’s short, 15 km prologue, the real Sudety MTB Challenge started today, with a 65 km course that included 2423 metres of climbing. Starting in the beautiful park in central Stronie Slaskie, the course quickly turned off the main road and onto a steep climb […]
Preparation: Two Aussies get ready for Sudety MTB Challenge
Sudety Mountain Bike Challenge (tagline ‘no bullshit, no compromise’) starts with a prologue around Stronie Slaskie today. and Mike Blewitt and I will be racing it for Team Subaru-MarathonMTB.com in a mixed pair. Stronie Slaskie, in the picturesque Sudety mountains in Poland, is 16,000 kilometres from Sydney – so we thought it best to bring […]
Sally Bigham’s Transalp mission: self-powered women
In an interview with Sally Bigham who will be racing Transalp 2014 in a mixed pair, unassisted, Subaru-MarathonMTB.com racer Imogen Smith delves into the integrity of pushing and towing in mixed pairs racing, and reflects on her own experience at Transalp last year. When Sally Bigham announced on Facebook a couple of days ago that […]
Reviewed: Pure Edge Native Whey Protein Isolate
For many years I’ve resisted using supplements, believing, hippy that I am, that I could get all the nutrients I needed from the foods I ate. I refused recovery drinks, gels, isotonic fluids, sports bars, and raced on Vegemite sandwiches and water. Lots and lots of sandwiches… But being a hippy, I’m also a vegetarian, […]
Racing Australia’s Red Heart – Does it really have to end?
Well it’s over! As usual I’m left with a mixture of relief that there’s an end to the pain and inability to finish my muesli each morning, and sadness that the adventure is over. Stage races are like that. I’ve heard the only cure for post-stage-race blues is to plan another one, so at least […]
Racing Australia’s Red Heart – darkness and rain! ICME 5 & 6
I finished racing hours ago but I’m still shaking. It’s the inevitable result of sleep deprivation, lactic acid accumulation, caffeine ingestion, and a lot of adrenalin! I can now safely admit that I loathe night racing, but was trying to keep positive before Rapid Ascent’s ICME stage 5 last night in the hope that this […]
Racing Australia’s Red Heart – ICME stage 4 and the race to recover
This morning we raced an individual mountain bike time trial over 22 kilometres, through sandy, washed-out four-wheel-drive track and singletrack. The course was a little less curvy and a little flatter than I’d hoped, but I managed to put myself through enough pain to win by a few seconds, which made me very, very happy. […]
Riding Australia’s Red Heart – ICME Stages 2 & 3
Just because it’s the desert doesn’t mean its flat, and Alice Springs has one tough climb on its western edge: Anzac Hill. It’s not very long – only a few hundred metres of sealed road, but the gradient boots up to about 26%, and averages about 12%. Stage 2 of ICME, yesterday evening, had us […]
Riding Australia’s Red Heart – ICME Stage 1
Bearing in mind that a lot of MarathonMTB.com readers are from all around the world, and that many Australians don’t know where Alice Springs is anyway, I thought I’d start this series of blogs about Alice Spring’s biggest MTB event with this fascinating geography primer. Skip ahead a few paragraphs if you just want the […]