Moruya Bicycles

The weather was bad, rain, rain and more rain. The plan was to do a few practise laps but that soon changed, to a practise walk. The track looked fun but it was very muddy. On Friday we got a ride in as the weather was clearing. The track was much different on the bike than on our feet, yet it was still quite an exciting and fun track, not too technical but it was very fast and flowy.

The cross-country race day came (Saturday). After watching all of the day’s races from 9am my legs were tired, but they soon came good in the warm up at around 2:30pm. The start time for the u/19 men was 3:30. This could have been the best time to race all day, that’s if the rain had stopped earlier in the day, but it didn’t. So it soon became pretty much the worst time to race. The start line was not seeded on performance only on your race number. And I just snuck in on the front row, with twelve starters the u/19 field was looking fast and the nerves were rising. I had a good start and was first into the single track. After the first lap I came through transition in second but I new 3rd (Mark Tupalski) was catching me. He caught me about a quarter of the way into the 2nd lap on the switch back climb. He stuck close to my wheel, very close, until around half way into the third lap when I looked back and he seemed to have disappeared which surprised me as he was all over me and I was starting to hurt up the climb. When he left me I knew if I wanted to keep it that way I had to work, and that I did. I entered the transition and Rebecca told me I had 1 minute on Mark, this gave me some incentive to work harder and keep the gap open. My last lap was a very slow one, the climbs were almost impossible to get up due to the mud. By this time me and the rest of the field had lost minutes on the leader, Robbie Hucker, who got away early. The encouragement from my friends Mike, Bec and Jeff helped a lot on the final lap and I claimed second place by more than a minute. Robbie was first by a large margin and Mark was third. Lots of thanks goes to Bec, Ben and John Henderson who did basically everything for me on the Adelaide trip. My new Mongoose Meteore Team held up brilliantly with the mud and got me around the track as fast as possible.