Whose idea was it to do a race straight after Christmas? Both Paul and I decided this would blow the cobwebs away and see who’d eat to many mince pies in the preceding weeks. The race was at Footscray Meadows which is very local to us. We had quite a group of supporters as both Katie and Emma came along, then Paul’s mum and Graeme’s parents joined us. Dave and his house mate even turned up just after the start. That’s the biggest crowd of supporters we’ve ever had.
I done a quick recce lap before the race which turned out to not be that quick. 15mins or so!!! By the time I was back Paul had turned up although didn’t have time to get a lap in. We lined up on the start line near the back amongst the other MTBs, of which there were quite a lot, some of these races I’m the only one.
The gun went and it was a sprint all the way down to the 1st corner. Bit of argy bargy through there and the field thinned out. At the 1st bit of singletrack and it was pretty slippy but I managed to keep the inside line taking a few people who went through the mud. I looked behind me and Paul was still with me at this point. We rode together for the next 10mins or so, up through the centre of the park (which was very bumpy, Paul on his full susser was ok though) and into the main singletrack part of the course. This had a dip and a log jump in which wasn’t very technical just a bit slow and draggy. That took us out onto the top part of the course which led into a long downhill with a 180o hairpin at the bottom. This corner was very grippy and you could really rail it round there, something most racers didn’t do, which meant I ended up taking people every lap at this point. This lead into a short draggy uphill, which is where I left Pal on the 1st lap, then through some trees into the start/finish straight.
The course was quite slow and not technical which just meant it was a slog around the course. Both Paul and I finished on 4 laps and were both shattered. We certainly over indulged a bit during the festivities!
