Skip to main content

KBAR MTB Race

To finish off the weekends events I decided to enter the Mountain Bike race on Sunday morning. I was expecting a relatively small race, with pretty much only the same competitors as the previous day in the multisport race. So I was pretty excited to see a lot of the local nelson boys had come through to race.

The race was 2 laps of the track from the previous day so I knew I would be fairly capable of keeping up in the single track as I knew the course fairly well. in total the race would be 40km with almost 1000m of climbing on sealed road, 4wd track and plenty of single track. I had a good start and was positioned in the leading bunch up the road and up the sealed section of the climb. As soon as we hit the dirt though the pace picked up and I couldnt respond after racing the day before. I held my position for the rest of the lap feeling stronger as the lap went on.


Heading in to the second lap I could a couple of riders in the distance and thought I would be able to catch them heading up the climb. Unfortunately once I hit the climb my legs didn't have the power to catch up to them. Once into the descent I pushed myself pretty hard to catch up but just ended up making mistakes and losing more time. In the end I finished 15th overall in 2:01, not a brilliant result but I raced for fun and also had a good hard training session.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Topsport Prologue Series #1

 With my K2 partner heading to South Africa to see family and do some racing (lucky bastard), I finally lined up at a major race as a solo competitor. With hand surgery in a couple of weeks potentially wiping out the next few months of races, I wasn't sure whether I'd even bother to enter this race but the racing bug bit hard!  While it was a warm morning, the wind was blowing hard! It was enough to make me slightly concerned about parts of the course, so I felt pretty bad for the novices, they were certainly in for a wake up call on what the Waimak can be like on race day! In the wind storm that was the 2011 Coast to Coast, I had managed to get to Woodstock dry, before swimming many many times in this final 15km due to the wind. There's really only two strategies for wind, paddle at the speed of it (or faster) so it doesn't impact you, or be at the heavier end of the scale so it doesn't affect you as badly. Unfortunately most of the time both of these strategies ar

Racing, Life, and Rediscovering Passions 2.0

Funnily enough I started off the last post on here with the following passage; “As most of you will have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet on the race/blog front recently. In typical me fashion, I got injured. Again! But this update is going to be a wee bit different to anything I have done in the past. It is going to be a review of the last year, relating to work, racing, life, and rediscovering my passions. I apologise in advance if any of you fall asleep while reading this, I have discovered that putting my thoughts on paper (or in this case online document) is a valuable tool to remind myself of lessons learnt through either success or failure, and ensure I keep moving forward. As someone far wiser than me once said, “don’t bury your failures, let them inspire you!” Annnnnnnd guess what… I did get injured… again. And just like the last post, I started a new job a year ago as well. This time though I finally followed my heart and took a step towards my dream of working on a rescue

Kayak Krazy 10km Series- Arawa

 After spotting this event on the CRNZ website I knew I had to add it to the calendar. While paddlers (especially multisporters) seem to avoid any form of flatwater racing, they are a brilliant way to track your performance over time as there is typically less external factors that can impact results such as flow rate or different line choices like on a river. While the Avon isn’t exactly the best example of this due to being tidal, timed efforts can still be performed reasonably consistently on an out and back course. Adding in tactical elements and the lost art of wash riding, and flatwater racing is actually quite fun and provides an interesting challenge compared to river racing. I’m always disappointed to see paddlers pull out or not enter events because it’s a flatwater race or the B course is on flatwater. You were going to be racing that day anyway, get out there and race! While talking about things that are disappointing, it’s pretty disappointing that a national series has