Diary of an Obsessive 24 Hour Cyclist

DC Ride

bigbadgav — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:45:01 +0000

Hooked up with the RSAWeb boys for a pre DC training ride, promised to take a few pics, some are okay, some are dreadful, you’ll figure out which is which pretty quickly. Thanks for letting me tag along, was good fun.

Interesting

bigbadgav — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:51:39 +0000

Been back for almost 2 weeks, been getting back into the swing of things, building up and riding a new bike and generally trying to figure out some existential personal shit as well as find a permanent abode.
Other than building up and riding the new bike I’ve not managed to acheive any of the other goals. Not ideal or perhaps it’s perfect, I think I’ll waft around a little longer until I figure out what’s up.
Later.

24 Worlds Race Report

bigbadgav — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:57:34 +0000

It’s been more than a week since race (nightmare)day and the pain and suffering is beginning to fade, I said I would never do another 24 hour race ever again, now I’m wondering if maybe I was a little rash? The chick seems pretty keen on holding me to that though, I can see why, I was a pretty miserable bugger through the night.

The night before we got the lights set up, I was using a Niterider Pro 1200 scaled down to 900 lumens (with 2 battery packs) for the bar, and a no name brand LED based head unit, the head unit was advertised as 900 lumens but in reality was nowhere near that. Lea performed a few miracles on the bike, he did snap his DTSwiss tool trying to remove the lockring to replace a bearing in my 240S rear hub, needless to say that didn’t go well. He did sort out the suspension on the bike though, he’s awesome, stripped and rebuilt the front fork and made it super plush in no time. Went to bad and woke up the next morning nervous as all hell.

The day started off with some nice weather, warm with some cloud cover and a cool breeze blowing to keep the temperature down, all good. We drove down to the course and sat in a traffic jam as we tried to squeeze in to the course along with the other 9000 people that were also trying to do the same thing, that’s alot of people all in one very small area. Got off loaded by the crew and rode down to the back up area with my kit, had a quick look around at the other folks and they were all looking very serious and very sorted. Always makes me nervous standing around when those around have got everything sorted, 2 bikes, multiple light kits, massage beds, food already sorted, damn hate those guys.

The crew moved in with my stash of stuff, most of the stuff in all honesty was for the crew, Lea needs a huge and well equipped workshop otherwise he’s just not a happy camper. At about 11:15 I got dressed up, lubed up and ready to rumble. We lined up and got called up one by one, always a pretty cool feeling. On the start line Willo’s father gave a touching send off for his son (some of you may recall, he was the 2008 24 WSC champ and passed away at the Epic this year).

The gun went off and the run started, quite a short one this time only 300 meters, I was well prepared for a much longer run but alas the first bit started off in an absolute flat panic, people sprinting like there’s no tomorrow, a few falls and general start gate madness resulted in a few guys going down on the tar before we’d even started. I pulled off a superb cyclo cross remount (in my mind at any rate), all the grace of a wide legged frog trying to land on a very thin stick, smooth, real smooth. I tagged onto the back of the front group as we shot off up the first easy roller as we started the long switch backed climbs I eased up a little to save a little something in the legs for later on as the front bunch took off after some crazy canuck who looked keen to get proper stuck in.

First lap done and I could settle back and reel people in with my superior, umm, my superior something. Doubts start flooding your mind and you start to think you can’t do this. Just kept repeating to myself “Keep It Together”, I was kind of keeping it together and started catching a few people over the next few hours, problems started appearring as I realised I wasn’t eating, I was trying but kept spitting everything out, not as useful as it could be. I was drinking solidly though, at least that was good. Pulled in at 18:00 for lights, 6 laps down, Lea and the Chick sorted everything out and after a 15 minute break I was good to go.

The problem with only having one helmet at a race like this is it means you can’t set up your lights the night before, and the risk is that on race day you put them in the wrong place, this is what we did, they were too far forward and after 2 laps I had to come in again and get Lea to move it further back as I thought my head was gonna be ripped off and I had a monster spasm going down the left side of my spine. It got moved and after a brief break I got going again. I did a couple of laps and then started a rather graceless mental collapse.

It was not nice, I just fell apart and couldn’t get my head to work anymore, I pulled off a couple of sneaky moves to try to get myself together, it wasn’t going well. The back up crew cajoling me, they tried teasing me, they tried appeassing me, they tried out right threats, a bit of guilt tripping seemed to be the best temporary fix and went and did a few more laps.

The legs seemed to be fine but I had some ugly bruising on my hands and feet that was certainly not helping my head cause, added to that I some weird cramp behind my right knee. I stopped a couple more times for batteries, they seemed to not be lasting as long as they were supposed to, not sure why but Lea went and organised a spare battery pack for me anyway.

The light started improving and I could finally get the light off my head, damn that was not the greatest helmet light design ever, too much height. I stopped again and had a bit of a nap, I was glad to hear the guys around me falling apart as well, the Brits behind me were employing the “threaten the talent” option and the guy across the road literally just stopped at about 9:30, his crew couldn’t get him out again, one of the other riders tried to get him going as did Stuart Dorland the organiser, he just refused, he was done, we’ve all been there, I’d just barely left there. Nothing worked, he was done, good on you mate, sometimes enough really is enough.

Finally I went out on what I had decided was my last lap, it took a long time and some serious dedication but I came in just after the clock struck 10:45, 23 hours of riding done, I was a wreck and wanted a beer.
340 km with 9000 meters of vertical height gain, my wrists were wrecked, my hands were bruised, my feet were bruised and the bum wasn’t in great shape, I was however done, very done. Jason English won with 24 laps, the next 4 completed 23 laps and were pretty close to each other. The Single Speed winner, Brett Bellchambers, finished up with 21 laps a massive effort on that course with that amount of climbing. There were a few DNF’s out there and a few people didn’t quite do what they had wanted to, me included, oh well, as the song says, Mama told me there’d be days like this.

Its Race Day

bigbadgav — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:12:26 +0000

What’s done is done, now I just have to ride, this is the easy part and I have the easy job. The backup crew have got their hands full with me today, the lights, the food, the drink, the twittering, the picture taking, the mechanicals, the timekeeping, that sounds like a rough job. Lea, Beth and Sara are going to be kept pretty busy indeed.

To the race, the Elites start at 11:45, the age groupers start at 12 and the teams start at 12:15. The run is really short this year, 300 metres, that means it is going to be absolutely chaotic, I’d prefer to have a longer run to be honest, it settles everything down a bit, now it’s going to be a mad crazy free for all sprint and it’s on tar as well. From here we head off for a bit of a start loopp and straight into the opening 5km climb, rail the pork barrel drops, quite intrigued to see who runs the drops and who runs the b lines. From here we head to the 2-3 km fire road climbs and then a bunch of steeper little bastards which won’t hurt now but if you kick them into submission now they’ll start to hurt later.
Then the sweet 3km descent which takes you through skyline and Duffy as well as a few others and you’e done, 20km of racing lap 1 done, then repeat.
The race ends on Sunday, I have to finish my last lap between 10:45 and 13:30, I can only start my final lap before 11:45 and that lap must finish before 13:30. Then the race is done and I can have my first beer for 6 weeks, I’ve bought a selection of the local artisan beers for my enjoyment, can hardly wait. Then I head home for a nap and at 18:00 we head to the athlete dinner and after party, can’t imagine this is going to go on for 2 long, considering the lot of us will be broken!

Then we pack and head to the beach for a week and get ready for the Single Speed World Champs, looking forward to some chill out time. Wish me luck and we’ll chat later.
Oh yeah, the backup crew will be posting twitter updates tonight.

A few pics (part 2)

bigbadgav — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:29:50 +0000

Important pre-race prep added into the gallery:

Some basic maths

bigbadgav — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:13:32 +0000

Finally made it to Australia and Canberra in particular, I’ve been a right royal pain the last few days. The 28 hour delay getting out here was probably not helping much. We arrived on Tuesday early afternoon, quickly stuck the bikes together and assesed the transport damage, the chicks bike took a bit of a beating (I’m convinced they think we’re kidding when we put fragile stickers on the bags) but my baby came through pretty well, gotta love Ti. We were both ravenous and wolfed down some local fare, basically a sandwich and a super tasty cup of chino, been missing that.

Put the full blooded race kit on and headed out to the track, the legs felt horrible, felt like I was peddling through thick pea soup, then again 3 and a half days of not riding and just commuting will do that to you. We found the trail centre at Mount Stromlo and wandered around looking for the course, hooked up with a local and cruised around with him. Halfway up the first climb the legs started turning on a little, took a couple of digs and they seemed okay. Missed a couple of the steep switchbacks uphill but will sort those out later. Slammed down the first descent, nice and sketchy descent lots of loose rocks and a couple of alley-oop drops, if you’re not on it every lap it’ll kick your ass proper, beauty!
Hit another 2 laps today, cruised with 2 of the Yanks, they seemed quite nice. Had the long descent nicely dialled, it was basically like a long pump track with some nice big berms, gonna need some focus on this guy on Saturday night.
And now for the Basic Maths, the course is 19km long, with about 430m of climbing per lap, we did a lap in an hour today so that should be maintainable. That means we should do about 22-24 laps, and basic maths gives us a total distance of 418 – 456 km, damn that’s alot, but what’s even more worrying is that the total climbing is going to be somewhere in the region of 9,500 – 10,300 metres of vertical height gain, that’s more than Mount Everest from sea level, and for those who don’t know that’s a whole bunch.

And my mechanic arrived today and brought along a spare cheerleader, and most of a bike shop’s worth of spares, hoping I don’t need a single thing.

Later all and will post a few pics tomorrow.

How Not to Travel

bigbadgav — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 16:00:05 +0000

We flew up to Jo’Burg and hung out at Ollie Thambo int’l Airport for the day, our connecting flight was supposed to be at 6. In Cape Town we got told that it would be delayed to 7, no worries only 1 hour.
We hung out at the airport for the day and get onto the plane, we taxi’ed out gave the engines a burn, turned around and came right back home.
For the next 4 and a half hours we sat on the runway and listened to the many excuses that were being made, apparently something to with a a fuel pump or something to do with a starter motor or something to with the fuel pump to the starter motor.
Then we disembarked at midnight and got taken to a place that looks like it generally gets used for cult brain washing conventions. So Sunday morning we wake up to here that the engineers are working on the problem and we must stay at the brainwashing centre, it was sometime around breakfast that I think the stinky brainwashing hippie’lytes started pumping us full of drugs as the whole lot of us were hyper lethargic all day.
At 15:00 we get a personal visit from the Qantas bulldog to come and tell us that we’re boarding and leaving at 6. And to cut a long story short, we’re leaving Sunday night, should be in Sydney Monday night and then we should be in Canberra by Tuesday midday. A full 25 hours late, not ideal prep, oh well…..
off to sydney we go then.

1 Week to go

bigbadgav — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 12:54:35 +0000

It has been an insane week and a bit!
Handed in my final thesis, major stress off load when I handed it in.
I drove up to Rhodes and back, 12 hours each way, for the Rhodes Extreme.
Moved out of our place and we are now officially homeless vagabonds, we do however rent a garage in town for R500 a month.

I packed up everything to fly to Oz to come and race. on that note you guys can track me on my twitter account or on a tweetizen group I set up here. Hopefully is should be cool and a pretty useful way to get an overview of what is going on before and during the race and not just from my backup crew’s biased view (who are awesome by the way).

Now we wait

bigbadgav — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:39:49 +0000

The last few months have involved lots of training, preparing and basic plain old worrying that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to. That’s all behind me now, now I sit around and wait. Wait for the hard work to pay off, wait for the flight, wait for the busses, the planes, the trains, the cars that are carrying me to where I need to be. Wait to see if my bike arrives in one piece, wait to see what the course is like, wait for meals, everything I wait for will take me closer to what I’ve worked for. Problem is, I can hardly wait, I’m not very good at waiting, never have been. Here’s hoping I don’t do something trully idiotic to stuff everything up while I’m so busy waiting.

In all this waiting there are many lessons to be learned, I’m sure, lessons about patience, lessons about appreciation. I’m not waiting for those however, I’m waiting for 11:45 on the 9th of October in Canberra, I’m waiting for the start gun to go. I’m waiting to learn if my mental preparation is better than the combined mental preparation of all the others on the start line. In 24 hour racing if you can win with your mind, you can will your body to follow through. That’s what I’m waiting for.

Do you know what you’re waiting for?

3 Weeks to the big time

bigbadgav — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:58:53 +0000

Busy putting new divetrain bits onto the bike. Going all traditional on it, running a standard 3X9 with 22-32-44 up front and an 11-32 out back, all business, no trimmings.

Finishing up the hard stuff this weekend, 4 hours tomorrow and 8-9 hours on Sunday, then next week head up to Rhodes for some last minute altitude training then the weekend after we head out. Damn I’m looking forward to this!