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Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
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Wed, 23 Mar 2011

Jindabyne Multisport Classic 2011 - 16:15
The event site is here with results a race report and photos.

I rocked up to compete in the Jindabyne Multisport Classic as a solo athlete for the fourth year in a row. This is probably my favourite race on the calendar, a gorgeous area to race through, really fun legs and a good attitude out on the course from everyone there.

In the lead up this year I have been unable to do much training from January 10 until the race day, with an injury and illness keeping me away from exercising much for 3 months I was definitely a bit underdone for the race.

All along I had ben hoping there would be a really strong solo field again, with the likes of Alex, David, Julie, Randall, Gary Rolfe, Aaron, Lee, Gary Rake, Ben Rattray all competing as solos. However for various reasons the only solos I knew who were competing ended up being Aaron, Lee and myself.

At the start line I was not looking forward to the swims, most years I have had a few months of doing at least 2 or 3 swims a week, this time I had swum twice since January 3rd and maybe 8 times since this race in March the previous year. I defintiely have to stay in the pool and put some serious time in to my swimming if I ever want to do this event really well.

1 Solo Female and 5 solo Men were at the start line, all of us obviously hoping to complete the day and have fun. Race start was 6:45am so we got going and I gave everyone entertainment or a cringe when I immediately went off in the wrong direction sighting on the wrong saddle in the distance while everyone else swam toward the first bouy. This was definitely a theme for me, going all over the place in the swims, in the end I lost 10 minutes or more to Aaron each time we did a swim through the day.

The first kayak following the swim is always a good leg to get settled in to the day and get used to the continuous moverment all day. This year my friend Kerrie (ENM as Gramps calls her, I think Awesome Nurse Muir is more accurate) had once again sepped up to the role of support crew for me, thanks to her for being an absolutely awesome support crew again this year, organised and keeping me moving well all day. She had me through al the transitions smoothly and encouraged me to keep going well.

Lee was unlucky enough to fall out of his kayak in this leg and I passed him there, the SES boats were both in the final 800 metres of the kayak so had not seen him fall out, I yelled at one of them to go have a look, in the end Lee said a fisherman helped him get to shore to empty the boat before continuing on. On to the run, which has less climbing and stays closer to the lake than the old first run I was soon passed by Sal and a few other fast runners on teams (I was already well behind the really fast teams due to my pathetic swimming)

The first run leg is still quite technical and a lot of fun, and it leads in to what in my opinion is the best leg of the day, the first mtb leg is rearkably technical and suits me down to a tee, if only it were 30 km long rather than 8km. There had been a lot of track work done on the trails here and the return leg of this ride toward transition had been improved a lot, easier and shorter but a heck of a lot of fun. I saw Aaron at the shared section of track so he already had a 15 minute lead on me here, due to my complete lack of preparation I expected this theme to continue for the rest of the day, he was racing well for a first time soloist here.

On into the second swim, the worst leg of the day (2.5km of swimming) I labored through that getting passed by a whole lot more teams and caught again by Sharon the solo female, however into the paddle I was able to move fairly fast again. Through the paddle I headed out on the second mtb leg, hoping to get some food down, a problem with my water meant I could not get much down for the leg however still felt pretty good on the whole. I saw Aaron again now with around a 23 minute lead on me.

Through the day I was fairly close to the teams Desciples of Ming the Merciless and Followers of Ming the Merciless, some of the children of the team members are those I coach mtb skills every week and they were cheering me through every transition all day which was awesome support from them and lifted my spirits. I got on to the long run feeling alright, stopped for my normal toilet visit at the thredbo river picnic ground to ligten my load for the climb and headed on up the hill.

During the climb two women from teams caught me up and Lee also managed to catch up, I picked my pace up a bit to stay near them, Lee however had not bought any water or food on this leg and suffered mightily for it, so ended up dropping off the pace ocne we hit the waterfall at the top. I thanked the women for their company as I had to stop to stretch out cramps near the end of the leg and then ran in toward the transition for the long bike leg.

Most years this leg is one of the most spectacular parts of the race, up into alpine grass lands near the Gungarlin river, however due to the river being too full and boggy terrain near it they had to change the leg to a ride up the road from Sawpit to Charlotte Pass before a car shuttle down to the lake again at Creel bay. This changed the dynamic of the race a lot, I appreciated the rest in the car and sitting at the swim start for an hour, however I missed the lovely long mtb leg. I was able to eat some solid food again and watched Aaron do his swim leg before I started. Some friends lined up someone to kayak next to me for this swim to keep me going straight, thanks to Tara and Michael for all of that.

The last few years the final kayak has been very windy, almost a case of surfing or crossing large waves for much of the 9.5km paddle. I borrowed Mark's surf ski for this leg rather than my Time Bandit, it was still windy up near Charlotte Pass so I assumed it would be windy ont he lake. As it turns out this is the calmest I have seen the water in years at this time of day, however better safe than sorry, I completed this leg in around an hour and only had the 5.5km run to finish off the day. I got moving and immediately felt my core muscles in pain with the jarring of running. Amazingly my legs felt fine but I could not pick up the pace due to the pain from the final paddle and swim in my core muscles.

Still I had at least 30 minutes on Lee in third and knew Aaron would already be finished so I settled in and tried to finish as fast as I could without too much jarring. Just as I neared the finish, Zoe, Declan and all the other kids that had been cheering me on saw me and rode and ran in next to me to the finish which was another awesome show of support from them. Finished in just under 12 hours, or just under 11 if you take off the hour enforced stop before the final swim.

Thanks to Kerrie for being awesome and supporting me, thanks to everyone who helped Kerrie out through the day. Thanks to Aaron and Lee for the race and thanks to Prachar and the rest of the Sri Chinmoy race team for this event, such a lovely course and such a fun day out. Easier and prettier than triple tri and less swimming, all good things.

Good to see a strong performance from Sharon the solo woman coming in around 15 minutes behind Lee too.

You should all put this race on your calendar nex year, it will be the weekend before the 6 foot track marathon and probably not clash with Huskisson or the Willo MTB race either. Fun to be had up in Jindabyne in early march 2012.

[/mtb/events] link

Tue, 08 Mar 2011

Buy known good quality, or avoid RavX at least - 18:00

Crappy RavX Gloves (fullsize)
 So a few weeks ago I decided to buy some new gloves, though not worn out some of mine were getting a bit old and rank. Also they tend to have no padding profile and work fine for mtb but I tend to think some padding helps on the road bike. I order some Serfas gloves from one shop, but they have still not appeared after a month at this point.

So while waiting for the Serfas and in need of some gloves the other week I purchased the pictured RavX gloves. They were cheap, and I think I found out why, I can not say much apart from do not buy these ever. The padding worked fine, however when I took this photo I had done 3 rides wearing them. One on the shopping/touring mtb to the fyshwick markets and back, around 20km. The next two were road rides, a cotter/uriarra loop and a climb from Jindabyne to Dead Horse Gap and back, so around 145km on the road bike. It is hard to see here, but looking at the enlarged photo I have circled the 4 places on the right glove and 1 place on the left glove that have already worn through or show serious wear signs (about to wear through). That both of the gloves have worn through the palm in less than 200 km of pretty tame riding is pathetic.

I have quite a few pair of cycling gloves, some of which have done over 2000km of fairly tough mtb riding and a lot of other riding in between, I have never seen a glove fail this fast.

[/mtb/gear] link

Fri, 04 Mar 2011

Another attempt at the SLER - 10:28
Back in 2004 a few of us headed up to Jindabyne to do what we were calling at the time the Silly Long Easter Ride, this is a 318km road ride in the Australian Alps region with over 6000m of climbing. It has been done by quite a few people since that time in two days, however only a few I knew had done the ride in one day (Davo, Ads, DeathMarch).

I have been keen to go back for a while, so Alex, Bleeksie, Greg, Chris and I were planning to do the ride last weekend. We headed up there and stayed at the Snowgums Jindabyne unit. I had the problem of a sore throat for two and a half weeks leading up to the weekend and was simply hoping it would get better by the time we were there to do the ride. Unfortunately the sore throat deteriorated into a cold and I tried to start the ride. As we did the first few climbs up toward Thredbo I realised I was not going to be able to continue all the way. At what was a fairly easy pace I was falling behind trying to conserve myself, once I made the decision to pull out rather than do the entire loop I started wasting myself a bit more to keep up all the way to Dead Horse Gap.

I want to do this ride so hope to return later in the year or next year and gt it done. Once I left the others I returned to Jindabyne, bought a newspaper and rested for most of the rest of the day. Slept for a few hours, read the paper and waited for the others to finish the ride.

After having some of the pies from Funky Pies from 42 Cafe in Nimitabel in December I was keen to have some more, I had not gone to the Canberra stockists. However I noticed on the funky pies website that the Jindabyne Bowling club sells them, so I headed there for some lunch. Vegan pies with a good variety, what could possibly be bad about that. It turns out they no longer stocked them, however there were a few left in the freezer so the chef prepared them for me, a little old and dry, however still tasty I was happy with that for lunch.

As for the ride, the guys hit Khancoban around 10am, Cabramurra by 2pm and Adaminaby before the bakery shut. Chris had started to pull away as his gearing made it difficult to climb slowly. Chris finished the ride by 8:10pm and the others pulled in at 9pm after a 5am start. Good to see, solid riding effort, I was jealous but with the Jindabyne Multisport classic 2 weeks later I did not want to make myself even sicker and possibly be unable to compete.

[/mtb] link

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