(Photo: Steven Rowe. http://mtb-images.ser.id.au/ )
It's rare for me to dread the sound of rain during the night as I slept, but not last night though. There was enough fear-n-loathing to share come Sunday morning as it dawned to a thick pall of rain over everything.
To be honest, if I was doing solo & not part of a team I would have just rolled back over & slept right through this morning. But, alas my team mate Paulie was due soon so it was time to fall outa bed, hang my head in the shower & throw lots of bike related stuff into the back of the Astra. When he rocked up he wasn’t to motivated either as he stood in the alleyway transferring his bike stuff into my car as he winced under the light rain shower in the cold dark morning.
We both blamed it all on Cadel Evans for his pitiful individual time trial effort overnight that we both stayed up to see him lose, & reflected on how many lost opportunities were squandered in the preceding stages only to save his best to what he was supposed to be good at. In the end I suppose the best person did win the TDF 2008, but it seemed like all the time & effort Cadel put into this year’s event actually in the end, was just banking on that one day – the final time trial – to give him the victory. It was too fine a margin to call, & we all drank in the hype. Lets hope we all learn from this.
Anyway, we have our own mountains to climb, & ours were located to the north east of Melbourne in the bushland around Lake Lysterfield. It drizzled & rained on the drive up & there was mud everywhere when we got there. ‘Goombah Village’ was set up at the tail end of the solo area just before the course ducked back into the bush. We did our transistion there. The Goombahs were represented with 3x solo entries, & 2x pairs entries. Dave & Stu punched out massive laps in solo, Bonar returning to form got 3 laps down, & the pairs teams of Amy/Melanie & myself/Paulie returned some healthy circumnavigations.
With my first lap out took me into familiar trails of Lysterfield, some part were actually pretty grippy & I was really able to rail the corners. But then the mud was a factor in certain stretches. This was good though, as I haven’t really been a very confident mud rider & this was my chance to face my brown slimy demon out there. Out on my 2nd lap, just after another rain, the mud got real slick & my bike developed a mind of it’s own, I just had to spin those pedals to keep everything motoring along. My cassette & front derailuer clogged badly halfway through this lap giving my no end of chain skipping, missed shifts & ghost shifting. Squirting the total contents on my biddon’s Gatorade onto the rear mech gave me about a 1/3 of a laps grace before it played up again.
After my transition I went to town hosing water on the drivesystem to wash the mud out in an attempt to stop this schizophrenic shifting. It worked , kinda.
My last lap out, the organizers changed the course to avoid the worst of the muddy sections, but introduced part of the Comms Games course & filled the bits in between with open gravel road & two-track.
In the end I called it quits after this 3rd lap. Being moody as a menstrual dairy cow of late, I have developed a short discomfort threshold for MTBing & have used the excuse of “I’m not enjoying myself” as solid defense for the defenseless withdrawal from the activities.
The drive home was accompanied with more rain & I have now definitely used my quotient of City West’s water residental allocation, bringing flood & Lysterfield mud to my backyard.
Till next time, but….
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