I had looked at doing a few endurance MTB races lately but many had been cancelled due to bad weather.

Last weekend there was a choice of the popular HUSKY 100km at the coast OR a 6 hour MTB enduro put on by the ‘Albury Wodonga MTB club’, but seeing the Husky was fairly muddy last year (and it broke my Specialized) I decided to head to the Albury event.

It appears to have been a good choice, seeing the Husky was flooded out and cancelled, and the weather in Albury was a cracker day, beautiful sunshine and comfortable short-sleeve temperature.

Placing myself fairly forward in the self-seeding start was good and I only needed to pass a few people on the long ‘first lap only’ climbing fire-trail right to the highest part of the course before the first entry into single-track all down hill again to the lowest part of the course. Plenty of rocky, bendy, steep, single track to put a smile on your dial 🙂

I put in a nice pace and only ate one gel and half a bottle every lap, plus a pop-tube of smarties which they handed out at rego…. perfect change from gels. My legs felt good until the last couple of laps when I had to slow down or hit the cramp edge on my quads. Slowing down did mean I lost a placing on the last lap, luckily I had entered in the 50+ so felt fine when I was passed by a 40+ category rider.

As usual us Canberrans featured on many of the Solo-rider podiums, probably because we have great single-tracks to hone our skills. Ed McDonald came 1st in solo men, Brett Bellchambers 2nd in 40+, Eliza Kwan 3rd in solo women.

I ended up 1st in 50+ and 4th in 40+, although they forgot about the 50+ podium presentation. The organisers have recently emailed me explaining their errors of missing the 50+ podium and are now sending me some loot for winning my category 🙂

Riding the first Canberra100 jersey, heading down a super steep drop-in of which there were several.