alixta

The race venue was a 3 hour drive from Brisbane, the last hour though some lovely back country roads inland of Mullumbimby. Great way to relax & certainly the best Friday I've had in a while.

I arrived there nice & early to register only to find rego was deferred to the next morning. Okay then, next item on the agenda pay for camping via the honour system only to find there were no deposit envelopes and no way of showing who had paid. Okay then, time to prep the bike, first up get my speedo (also altimeter & heart rate monitor) setup, only to find I left at home. Maybe I'll just sit here, eat my choc frosted donuts & clean my bike with a rag & cup of water, so that is what I did for the next hour or so. Quite therapeutic really.

As the afternoon rolled on the other riders rolled their respective wagons in, mostly Queenslander's it seemed. I wandered around & chatted to a few nice folk. As the sun set it was time to bunk down (early nights are the best bit about camping I reckon). My dinner was a few mouthfuls of my premade cold pasta, not as bad as it sounds. I settled down for the night and did some podcast catching up, I finished it up with a few episodes of Coach Jeffs Powerfit podcast, with my brain suitably inspired I wrote down a few goals for the event (sub 4hr time & top 10 placing).

Next morning I awoke to the PA system instead of my alarm, somehow my iphone come alarm had drained it's batteries overnight. I checked out my breakfast offerings of power cookies & bananas & decided to supplement them with a coffee from the mobile vendor. I used to shun coffee pre-event but now I can't do without it. 

Number pinned, toilet stops taken care of & we all lined up for the briefing & start. I met a few more nice people on the line & then it was time to pedal hard.

As planned I started off toward the front of the pack, I had no intention of trying to match the pace of the jack rabbits but I did have plans to not get caught in any bottlenecks. The first part of the race is open gravel roads with a decent gradient, I passed a few in the first few kilometers of the climb and likewise got passed by a few.

Everybody sorted themselves out by the time the track tightened up, I was in a bunch of 4 or 5, then after a few run offs & crashes, mostly due to the super slippery track off course and plenty of sticks ready to bite your wheels I was all alone. Or at least not having my rear knobs rubbed off.

Prior to the race I put on a new chain, cluster & middle ring, mostly to go along with my new wheelset featuring a chris king rear hub but also to get it bedded in for the 24hr race the following weekend. Good idea it was, until the first time I tried to drop into granny ring and the gears went all weird. I jumped off and ran up the hill to keep my place, then jumped on the bike and crunch, there goes the chain.

I was pretty pissed off so wasn't the most efficient. Finally getting the bike upside down I pulled the nifty cannondale tool from the stem. Dialed up the chain breaker, wind, wind, ping... ah that's got it. Nuts, the chain broke the chain breaker, did I mention I was pissed off :-(

I gathered my thoughts then pleaded with every passing rider, 'got a chain breaker mate', 'got a chain breaker mate', 'got a chain breaker mate' ... mostly I got grunts & similarly poor excuses (pretty much what I would have done that early in the race I guess) then finally a good samaritan on a Carver 650B stopped and leant me his. I got busy, pin pushed, chain installed. I turned around to thank him & return the tool but he was gone. Packed my stuff up & off I pedaled like a man possessed. I attacked every rider I could for the next few km of mostly hill climbs. I took a few risks in the loose stuff and pushed my heart rate a fair bit higher than I really should have.

After I passed enough riders to calm down I got my heart rate back to tolerable just in time for the start of the big climbing section at the mid point of the race (which according to my guestimate would be about 1:30hr into the race). The reasonably solid training I have been doing seemed to pay off, the hills weren't any smaller and I still uttered a few choice words every time I turned a corner & looked up ahead. OMFG or something similar. Anyway I kept spinning away, always trying to go a harder gear to get the pace up & get it done with, usually that didn't last too long though. I kept catching & passing other riders, I don't recall being passed by others but I'm sure that was not the case. Somewhere in there I caught up with the good Samaritan and returned his tool, here you go mate, another 200 grams for your pockets :-)

I picked up my food drop (a banana & power cookie bar) & a water bottle refil at the 35km mark, I had some gatorade powder in my drop too, but as I'd hardly touched my bottle on the bike I left it behind. Apart from not drinking as much gatorade as planned (I'm working on that) my nutrition plan was going well. My last long race (the 100km Epic) left a lot to be desired so I was happy to be eating & feeling strong.

Another few km of hill climbing & log climbing (there were quite a few trees fallen across the track, cyclocross fans rejoice) and it was time to get just deserts. Before that though, an observation. I was riding with one guy for quite a few kilometers, I passed him before the food drop, then he passed me back when I stopped. I tailed him for a while until we got to a log dismount where I passed him, I took off at a regular pace, looked back maybe 3-4 minutes later & he'd dropped way off the back? This seems to happen a lot in longer races, funny how riders can push & push & then ... pop. I really try to pace myself so if (& when I guess) I do pop it's not a dramatic fail. I don't recall seeing too many other riders eating on the trail and wonder how many try to push beyond 2 hours without eating?

Anyway back to the fun stuff, after climbing for roughly 9km (I'm finding out these distances & estimated timings from the supplied course profile) it was time to dail up the big chain ring & point my 29er downwards. Woohooo, 10+km of pretty much nothing but looking ahead for sticks & pointy rocks. There were a few technical washed out rocky areas at the start of the decent (rather there than the bottom) but plenty WOT fire trails. Yeah I like swoppy singletrack & technical climbing, but after about 40km of saddle time it's nice to go F A S T. I saw a number of riders mending flats along this section, including one poor bugger pleading for a spare tube, "sorry mate only got one 29er tube" as I wizzed by, payback is a bitch I though momentarily before I appeased the karma gods & thought compassionate thoughts (didn't make me stop though).

Somewhere in all that free fun & did have to stop twice to wrestle some spoke eating size sticks out of my shiny new wheels, thankfully the only causality was my over priced lefty speedo mount & seeing as I didn't even have a speedo I wasn't sure if I should laugh or curse. I think I ate some more banana instead.

Downhill bits done & dusted there was about 10km of ups & downs to go (mostly ups really). A lot of the track very similar to the fire trails in the Coffs Harbour marathon. Funnily enough during the race we doubled back and re-did some of the tracks in reverse, I didn't know this until a few other riders mentioned it after the race. Even odder (in an odd way) was when we came back through the camp ground (yep the one where we started) I didn't recognise it, I remember thinking wow, all these support vehicles have driven to meet the rides at this first checkpoint. I'm not often accused of being a thinker but that is a new low for me :-)

I knew I was getting close to the end & my legs were letting me know, I had passed a few riders on a previous short climb (that took forever) and felt a bit worse for wear. A quick check behind & they were not as far back as I hoped. Thankfully at the next marshall point I got a few claps & the welcome news that there was only 400m to go. At least this time I recognised the dirt road & I did the usual power hard to cross the line in style.

Without timing chips & no speed/stopwatch I didn't get my exact time but I'm pretty confident it was under 3:30hrs. I'm not sure on overall placings so am waiting impatiently for the official results to come out. I didn't score a trophy for top 3 but did jag a nice retro jersey for sticking around for the random draw prizes.

http://tr.nelson.co.nz/freedommarathon.htm <-- race homepage

http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Freedom-MTB-Marathon-race <-- 60km track on bikely