Back in the early days of my racing I always looked at 12 hour races as a pain! The thought of being under a small canopy in the rain, changing wet clothes and putting on soaking shoes never really enthused me. The reason I enter in these events now is probably only that the last four years of racing these endurance events I have been fortunate enough not to get caught in the wet.
My coldest was the Mont 24hr in Canberra in 2003 - while doing a lap at 4am my bottle of water was freezing up…no idea why I actually wanted a drink given that it was that cold! In fact at the time I was thinking ‘why am I doing this’ a kangaroo nearly bowled me over out of the darkness! The other extreme was again in Australia, this time in Victoria doing a 24hr in 2007 with temperatures of nearly 40 degrees and man eating flies buzzing round!
I really enjoy this format of racing - doing short laps as hard as possible and always trying to beat the last lap time and racing to be the fastest team. This weekend at Moonride in Rotorua our team was sponsored by Balance Nutrition. We were looked after pretty well with great products to keep us refueled and recovered to bang out the fast laps for 12 hours. It was a bit like a kids party where you get a goodie bag to take home too – thanks Balance, the cupboards are stocked!
We had the fastest team on the day organised by Mark Leishman, who took the first and last lap honours (with just a few more in between!), Scott Thorne, 2010 Xterra Champion and excellent all rounder, and lastly Dave Sharp, a fast Wellington local who has motivation to burn. We were kept on our toes from the fast Rotorua boys but with our consistent lap times we managed to pull out to a comfortable lead of round 7 minutes. Thanks to Keryn (Dave’s wife) who had the team manager business down to an art with every lap and transition timed and accounted for. The tracks in Rotorua are built to be ridden at speed and for an endurance lap race they were perfect, nice to be able to style the laps up with a few jumps and whip round the corners, laps were about 8km each with the fastest lap times from our team around mid-18 minutes.
Leishman pulled out a blinder last lap which included a sprint on a retro BMX to the finish line, had to be there to see it! We finished up with 36 laps one ahead of the Rotorua lads, a great day of racing by all and a crankin’ event to be part of…the night riding on Saturday was hilarious to say the least!
I might have to change my blog title to “Sharratt Racing Team” because over the last month my lovely wife Bex has been getting up to a bit of racing which is awesome. At the last minute (again, bit of a habit forming, that’s a Gemini thing!) she decided to contest the Women’s 6hr Solo, I thought that was a great idea and thought she would do well as long as she ate often and drank plenty. I find it hard to control myself in longer races to be able to push through to the finish, but Bex is quite a master in endurance events and is able to pace herself. She proved this with super consistent lap times right through the 100+ kms that she raced. Bex rode a perfect race and her only complaint was having to stop three times over the 6 hours for us to restock her pockets and drink bottle. Her aim was to reach the 14 laps which the winner did last year, she finished with time to spare riding to a comfortable win with 13 laps which is fantastic effort and was probably only 6-8 minutes off getting that 14th lap dialed.
The weekend away was awesome, plenty of laughs and best of all the track was in fine form for super fast lines. A few days of recovery and I will be back in to training for the next event which is down in Hanmer, Mt Isobel Challenge.
I’ve just lined up my winter training weapon – I’ve just taken deliver of one of my all time favourite cycling machines…a Cateye Cyclosimulator. Can’t wait to tap out a few secret sessions as I plan for upcoming races…LOOK OUT!
See you on the tracks wrapped up warm!
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