Posted by It was one of those great ideas of mine (to compete in the Kona Oddysey MTB Race) that vanished before I had time to do anything about it – an idea quashed by a facebook post from RapidAscent over Christmas that declared that entries for the 50km race were full.
Then about 10 days ago this arrived:
Hi there John,
Thank you for your entry. Your payment has been processed successfully, and you are now entered into the event.
Below are your entry details:
Event: Kona Odyssey Mountain Bike Marathon, 18th February 2012
Competitor Name: John Dawson
Category: 50km Kona Shorty
Entry ID: 47475 *
Competitor Name: John Dawson
Category: 50km Kona Shorty
Entry ID: 47475 *
They’d extended the field size, and apparently I’m doing the Kona Mountain Bike Marathin in a couple of weeks! Yay.
Given this turn of events, Kim and I thought we had better get out and actually see if we could ride 50km, and so with a beautiful day forecast for Saturday off we went.
We did a circuit up from Belbins Road up Stringy Bark Gully onto the Meehan Ranges, back down over the other side to Flagstaff Gully and then around to Bellerive, before following the trails and roads around to Lauderdale and linking in with the Tangara Trail route described on tassietrails.org before returning to our cars around Single Tree Hill and back to Belbins Road.
Unfortunately, my indestructible, waterproof Panasonic Lumix camera died the other week and it’s off visiting the repairman, so I decided to have another go with my Contour GPS video camera. This is the result of a fun days riding and a bit of editing:
The video was originally edited to the music of Coldplay’s song “Paradise”, but EMI took exception to that so the above is now just the sounds of the road.
Seems my distance estimation isn’t so hot as we ended up doing a touch over 75kms, you can check out the full ride route from my garmin GPS here.
Oh, and there was also that ‘little crash’, nothing spectacular, but always surprising how quickly accidents happen:
Anyway, despite being pretty shattered at the end of the ride, I pulled up OK, and I hereby declare myself ready for the Otways … as Fort Minor put it:
This is 10% luck,
20% skill,
15% concentrated power of will,
5% pleasure,
50% pain,
And 100% reason to remember the name!
20% skill,
15% concentrated power of will,
5% pleasure,
50% pain,
And 100% reason to remember the name!
OK, maybe I should do a wee bit more riding in the next couple of weeks, because I suspect that at the moment it will be 20% luck and 80% pain.