Dirt rider roundup

There hasn't been much racing for the past month, but that has just given everyone time to get some training. So here we go, a quick update on what everyone has been up to and what's coming up.

Jim Hsu has been training on his road bike up through the hills around Melbourne. I caught up with him at the FTF Wednesday night ride this week and he had this to say:
{Neil} So Jim, tell me how is your fitness shaping up with Tour De Africa only a few months away?
{Jim} My fitness is getting back to good shape.
{Neil} What's on the cards between now and then?
{Jim} The Gravity 12 hour should be fun on the SS, it's been a while since we did a race for fun. I'm looking forward to the road crits [this weekend] for a road race virgin it's daunting... and the XC series during the summer.
{Neil} Thanks for the update Jim, finally just before we go can you stop hurting me on our weekend rides?
I wasn't able to make out Jim's response as he had attacked.

Steve Caddy has caught a mild strain of what is being described as "the bird flu". He's put a good face on it, preferring to discuss the gains in core strength he's made while coughing for the past month.

Ryan Moody declares he hasn't been training because "I feel like the new challenge is to not train and then turn up to these events and just smack myself! It has worked in the past, and the feeling of placing ahead of others, especially when they 'have' been training is extremely satisfying!"

Rumour has it he's been doing a lot of rock climbing to help him deal with the big bumps on the rigid single speed at the Gravity 12 hour. "I will be riding the single speed ridged again and may even sport a carbon saddle just to save some grams and toughen me up some! I'm looking forward to smashing myself up big time, hanging with like minded, non trained MTB buddies while having giggles about awesome berms and whoops, cranking it between trees and rock, and attacking the competition like it's a road race!"


David Rusden has been working furiously down at Baum HQ, and rumours have it we might even see his new bike soon. Potential unveilings may occur at the Surf Coast 6 hour or Kona 24 our... I hope he remembers the times I've lent him my bike.

Neil Robinson, well I've been practising monos and stoppies while trying to get some good training blocks in. Work has been killer, but there are a few races early next year that excite me, and make me want to be faster on the bike. With those goals in mind I've been training super early or late, trying to get some long hours in to my legs. I've done some racing on the track with good results and will race with Jim and Ryan at the Gravity 12 hour, it will be a good chance to see how I'm fairing mentally and physically, I'm hoping I don't regret suggesting the single speed team. Look out for us racing as the B(a)um Bandits.

Four Rides of Remittance

Four rides is the standard period between the rusted post-layoff state and the beginning of feeling dialed. No fewer seems to do it, any more and it's going to be a torturous return. Four normally kicks it off.

One
The nerves begin at four o'clock, spidery excuses crawling out of the back of my mind and all over my will to ride. It's cold. It looks pretty windy tonight. The trails will be slippery and dusty after months of so little rain. But the excuses stay on the shelf for tonight and when Jim comes by to ask if I'm riding my mouth makes "yes" sound decisive before ego's hesitation can issue a maybe.

That doubt is there in my legs too. The ride out to the trail-head is too fast. Tyre pressure is too low, or too high. There's some kind of kink in my shifting.

Nods of greeting in the group and idle chit chat pass the time in the cold air and cold HID light until two or three riders leak away and the rest give chase. Against my will I'm off after them because hanging back to ride with the 'B' group - weekend warriors and sport class racers - isn't going to take me where I want to go. I'm heading for further and faster, for better. Improvement hasn't come that easily to me in the past but the formula I'm sure of is simple in its ability to beat you into shape: ride with people who are faster than you are.

The file into the first line of singletrack is haphazard and messy. The drop-in is steep with a ninety degree turn at the bottom and not well suited to the stutters of nervous riders at the back of the bunch. I drop a little off the back with a couple of other stragglers. Ego claims I'm faster than these guys but reality is proving otherwise.

My legs are cold and burn with the acceleration needed to regain ground lost to fingers too desperate for the brakes - brakes which come on too strong, too soon and too late. These tyres don't grip, especially the front one and my hips aren't committed to the turns, my outside foot too often unweighted. My head dips to light up obstacles I didn't quite catch on their way through the beam and I trace them with with the light on their way under the front wheel. When roots and ruts jump out of the darkness the old fear reflex stiffens the body to brace for impact, but only ensures that there is one.

Whose quantity is lacking: light, lines, recovery.
Whose number is too generous: logs, ruts, false edges, black creatures in the shadows.
Whose nature is elusive: cornering, braking, gravity, traction, dust...

Fucking dust! It's almost impossible to see through. It's in my lungs. There's too much for my eyes to take in as it lunges past and upward and at me in an unfocussed rush. My mind replays songs from the day and I'm only half surprised to find myself on the ground feeling like the devil just kicked me in the side. I lose the tail of the A-group and get picked up by the Bs. My hip is midnight blue and yellow-green for a week and a half.

Two
"Yes."

I am riding tonight. My voice is firm and positive, my tone says "of course I'm riding!" Somewhere in the back of my mind a less confident "maybe" just lost its chance to escape.



Tyre pressure, the air, the ride out stay off my mental case tonight and once I'm rolling something which has been missing begins to build: anticipation. Legs turn better circles, the saddle is welcoming.

We're chatting in the car park when someone new rolls up. He's friendly and eager, but also of a starkly different body type to the gathered riders. "Boy, you guys look pretty serious", he observes. "I hope you're taking it easy tonight!" When no-one from the regular B group shows I ask him if he knows the trails. On his assurance that he does, I tell him to hold onto the back as long as he can and not to be discouraged, explain the two group system and his misfortune in making tonight his first outing.

His introductory words are almost prophetic. The route is new and novel, and led by a pair of Elites intent on tearing the legs off of the entire group. I just hold on through the first batch of rapid-fire singletrack. I'm not completely there but the bike is beginning to feel good -- double good if I'm on the wheel of someone with an eye for the line.

There's this point where your body starts to react automatically to what your eyes saw in the light a half second ago, but your brain panics and you're stricken by a wickedly sickening sensation that your physical reactions are outrunning your conscious perceptions. And I'm on point, balancing - nailing the weight shift and line maybe three corners in a row before choking up and braking or overshooting.

We storm out of the riverside trails and into suburbia. A nuclear ball of high intensity beams ripping up the streets. Blinded, cars slow to crawl and hug the curb. We pass a house full of music, drunk revellers on the front lawn whooping loudly as we whip past. At a rail crossing we swam through the waiting cars and in their windows I catch shocked and bewildered office-faces, pale as death in the HID glare behind the glass.

The pace is relentless and the group thins as moves uphill, jumping the gutter onto a narrow side walk. If just one car pulls out of a driveway here things will get mighty nasty mighty quick... Thoughts better not considered.

Very suddenly the path is gone, terminated by a cobblestone ledge that must be hopped by the group steeplechase style. A very uphill singletrack takes the place of the path and charges up between old houses smelling of woodsmoke and evening roast. The trail canopied by trees, carpeted by Autumn Herself, about twice as long as you want it to be and it explodes into the back of a dead end-street. Two left turns and there's another suburban single trail, same decorator, same destination.

The bunch doesn't let up on the pace and kicks down a side street a'ways before hanging a vicious right turn into an private driveway which in turn forks into an alleyway - more riders lost out the back. The alley feeds a rear-of-way access road maybe two thousand metres long, still dirt from the old days where the dunny man's cart would come and collect the household sewerage. The road is a flashing tunnel of old paling and corrugated iron fencing and at the end spews us out over a road and into a trail which dives back down to the river, back to the trails.

My legs are on fire, have been for what seems like an hour when a low hanging branch tears the light off of my helmet. Lights out: blindness. I stop and re-fix it to my lid. The bunch is gone, but I'm happy to have held on for so long and on my way back I find Brian, who has also been dropped after a crash took away the confidence needed to rail night time singletrack at full speed.

Three
"Riding tonight?"
Of course; I ride every Wednesday night.

Tonight my bills are paid. The bike sings and tightens and grabs a hold of the line when pushed. The tyres are eager for the dirt and though there are mistakes and misses, my body is relaxed and unfazed. Be not like the inflexible the twig, Grasshopper, but yield like the boughs in the breeze.

The lines began to reveal themselves and my eyes are beginning to see singular things to aim for instead of armies of obstacles. Though I’m far from the charging head of the trail-eating beast I'm not swinging off its tail anymore now either. I'm somewhere in the middle.

With my eyes, brain, legs arms and digits dialled again there’s time to notice things like the computer - we're holding 35km/h on narrow trails, through trees that leap out of thick darkness. There's time to notice too that I'm having big, dripping spoonfuls of fun. I am on my way back.

Four
Four is a road ride epilogue.

Four is 40 yard fog at 5am, big breakfast, a flasher on each end and pushing sleepy legs out of the city into the hills. Four is mist collecting and dripping of the front of my cap. It's rhythmic breathing and the waking birds, winding, climbing roads. Empty, winding, climbing roads. Shafts of sunlight like God's fingers through the trees. Feet and hands so far beyond numb they feel the size of pizza boxes, and just as dead.

Four is climbing til it hurts, til it stops hurting and hurts again in different places. It’s vinyards on rolling hills in the early post-dawn.

Four is passing out into sleep on the couch. It’s ‘Honey, just go to bed already’, doing so without remembering and not waking for eleven hours.

Four is Saturday. Sunday is for rest.
Monday, the training week begins.