For great justice

How are you gentlemen?

BaumTeam will be present and correct, if not united, at the Kona 24 Hour race in Forest this weekend. We're not all batting for the same team though. Mr Hsu will be turning out quick laps for The Old, The Fat & The Grumpy (I believe those descriptors aren't singularly representative of individuals but rather are attributes common to all of the team's members).

Neil, Ryan and I will be joining forces with McQuain under the All Your Race Are Belong to Us moniker. We have no chance to survive.



Swing past and say hi. For great justice.

As it happened -- in pictographs!

It began like this:








Then, a few short months later, here's how it went down...

Neil building the new babies at Baum HQ:










All is quiet in camp on the Friday night.




Ryan winds it out towards the end of a lap.


This is the good stuff.


Yours truly.


Neil demonstrates the real-man's guide to race nutrition:

Carbo Cake loading.


Hydration.


Midnight tweaking (ok, more like 3 am tweaking).


The mid-morning mellow, this is where the crush of fatigue sets in, just before the last ditch GU and Red Bull caffeine charging and panic fires everything up before the finish. (I like how the odd shadow here make it look like Mr Hsu is wearing a man-bra.)




Jim, the happy bicycle man! "Riding bicycles is FUN!"


Mr Hsu teaches Neil how to perform "bike-fu" on nasty singletrack blockers who bring dishonour on your family.


Ryan cranks it in like a demon.


We missed third by how much?



The obligatory team shot. A huge thanks to Volvo for the use of a ridiculously sweet XC90. Whatever Swedish majik is welded into that thing works; we're all home alive after all.


Feebs and I had no such luxury.



But we did get a pretty wicked sunset.

New bikes; The Mont

I'll start at the beginning, since that's the proper order of things, and since the start is the reason this post is ever so late. The start – that is the delivery and the 'getting to know you' honeymoon period – is normally a slow finding of grace. There's some fumbling with buttons and 'ok, you go left, I'll go right', but the embrace develops and it gets gradually more exciting. There's time for playing around on gutters, slow rides down to the park for photos and sandwiches, playful romping around on the local whoops and twisties; but that's not how it was this time.

This time the start was a headlong rush. There was no time at all and we had to get to the dance even though our fascinators had yet to arrive and our hair was barely set. Neil and I arrived at the factory three days before the Mont 24 Hour to build and collect three span-fankin' new titanium Baum Cubanos, the first three evar. It was the end of one saga, parts having sat in customs limbo for an agonisingly long time, and the beginning of another.

There were hiccups, small ones, like ordering oversize stems and regular size bars (oops!). And there were amazing graces of timing and co-ordination which saw me intercept a new light mount, express posted to Benalla, on the way to the race. Neil collected the third XTR shadow rear derailleur in the country from the Shimano tent on the morning of the race and did a hell of a job of getting everything on our bikes straight and tight by midday.

When the gun went off at 12 o'clock on Saturday the bikes had yet to be ridden, the brakes were barely bled, fuck all of nothing was bedded in and— who can remember what pressure is supposed to go in these forks? Squish squish. A little less I think. Pshht. Holy crap, these things are amazing. No, not like that. Turn the damping up. Oh my god. Neil, Mr Hsu and I were good to go. Baum-shop ring-in roadie, Ryan, had never been off road much before. Nor had he ridden at night, but we got the vague impression that he could turn a pedal given half a chance, having heard whisper that his training partner in seasons past had the last name 'Evans'.

So it starts with the race. I won't talk about the bikes for now because it starts with the race. The track was face-meltingly fun. More or less flat and all-over-the-place swoopy. Whoops and berms everywhere, very little fire road, lots and lots and lots of singletrack and for the most part it was smooth. Not so smooth after 15 hours of pounding come 3 am, once the roots and rocks were a little more exposed and the braking bumps were deepening and shifting with each lap, but certainly no Reedsdale rock garden. In a word: fun.

There were some lessons. Mr Hsu learnt that ExtraLight's seatpost clamps aren't called ExtraTight for a reason. Neil learnt that alloy nipples aren't the place to win the gram counting race with Steve. I learnt that XTR disc rotors are very sharp, that Fox forks are imbued with The Lord's Own Goodness and that motor homes with gas stoves, double beds, showers and toilets are very much like the Hilton at a 24 hour race. Ryan learnt to ride dirt (and he learnt fast); and we all learnt that Thompson's micro-adjust posts don't need grease.



When my watch fired off at 2 am my eyes didn't immediately open. Instead, my brow furrowed real deep-like and a vile, visceral reaction to the sport welled up into a big lump just beneath my sternum.

Fucking... who does this sport? It sucks! Arrrrghhhhnnnnnnnnchchhhh. I clawed my way out of bed, not at all grateful that it was wider, warmer, more woman-filled and better insulated from the runway noise of the Canberra airport than everybody else's. 45 minutes later I was happily zipping along the trails, too warm for arm warmers, and calling out cheery thanks to the race marshals and people who let me slip past them.

When I rocketed back into transition to claim the slowest lap of the night, Neil asked me how the track was. 'The braking bumps are getting deeper.'
'Pfft. Pussy.' Two laps later, he rolled back in oozing blood.

Now, it went on and on like this well past dawn. Till 1:00 in fact, daylight savings time kicking in some time during the night. Roadie Ryan, who'd been well off the back during our trundling recce lap, layed down night laps which put me to shame. Day laps too actually. I got my mojo back and fell deeply in love with my new titanium affair. You're probably utterly sick of hearing about the race (we came 4th by the way, missed third by about two minutes which is a bitter pith given that we'd been as high as second at one point), so I'll get onto the bikes.

Or rather, my bike. Neil and Jim can tell you about theirs later on if they like. They're more or less the same in that they're painted alike, are made of the magic metal, are hand butted, sized to fit us like exquisite gloves and godawefully expensive nice.

We have differing wheels, brakes and miscellaneous finery. Jim, being the midget (supernaturally strong midget) that he is, has a frame butted to within an inch of it's life. It's quite sublime the way the tubes taper and wane.

Without further ado, here are the pics. I'll try to get out and take some nice ones, but for now these will have to suffice. Total weight for my bike is somewhere around 9.8kg, with pedals, steel bolts and a Stans-filled UST tyre setup.