The hub for marathon mountain biking
I’ve been to Alice Springs, in Australia’s red desert heart, to race five times now, I love it so much it’s never hard to justify going back Stage racing out in the Alice Springs desert brings some special challenges with it, so as I’m writing reviews of the trails and getting ready to deliver race reports, […]
I didn’t expect to come away from watching the Cairns UCI MTB World Cup with anything other than a feeling of inadequacy. I was there with a green media pass around my neck to report for Australian Mountain Bike magazine on how XC racers are dealing with the increasing ‘gnarliness’ of World Cup tracks – […]
It’s pretty common these days for a mountain bike stage race, even a marathon stage race, to include a short TT leg, usually by way of a prologue. Mountain bike TTs give riders a chance to thrash out some of their nerves, and from a race director’s perspective are useful for sorting out seeding safely, […]
If you’re reading this it means you have a bit of spare time and if you have a bit of spare time you’re probably not at the Cape Epic. The world’s most exciting, prestigious, and demanding mountain bike race is on now. Eight days, 718km, climbing 14,850m. Television crews, helicopters, pasta parties. You’re missing out […]
Strava changed cycling. Data is no longer the domain of coaches; bragging no longer confined to the coffee shop; and racing is on every day, not just Sundays. I don’t want to discourage anyone from using it, because it’s useful and fun – great for tracking improvement and finding new rides – but If you’re […]
Today, Tasmanian MTB rider Ben Mather won one of our oldest stage races, four brutal, muddy days in Tasmania’s wilderness: Wildside and his Facebook update caught our eye – ‘OMG,’ he wrote ‘I just won Wildside!’. It’s exuberant, and it runs contrary to a trend that I’ve noticed over the last few years, and one […]
I feel like I went to sleep and woke up with a new life. There was no magic, though – just a lot of hard work by loved ones. I got sick. One day I was living in Brisbane, the next, Sydney. I grew up in Sydney and left a few years after I started cycling, […]
The Wicked Wombat at Bungarra, just outside of Jindabyne, was the last race of 2013. In its third year, and this year has attracted Australia’s best, with Andy Blair and Jenny Fay of Swell-Specialized riding in the mixed pairs category. People made the trip from as far as Darwin and Brisbane to take part in […]
I have a lot of, ahem, idiosyncrasies when in comes to food, both on and off the bike. I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years (that’s over half my life and way longer than I’ve been riding bikes). I eat the same thing for breakfast every day and have, with minor variations, for about four years. […]
If you’re not interested in breasts, you may as well stop reading now. Still with me? Okay. We talk a lot about lycra and socks and shoes and gloves and helmets in the cycling world, and maybe because more men are into mountain biking than women, maybe because of some hangover taboo, it’s not so […]
