Gearing up for Italy
Thursday, 28 July 2011
There are only a couple of weeks before the team travels to Vicenza, Italy for the World Championships. This weekend is the last chance for a MTBO competition on home soil. The whole team has been training very hard and the time has come to start winding down the volume so we peak at just the right time. The three Tasmanian JWOCers will contest the Tasmanian MTBO Championships at 4 Springs Lake. Chris will also contest the Queensland MTBO Championships which doubles as a round of the National MTBO Series. Steve recently competed in the Red Centre Enduro in Alice Springs, a 5 day, 7 stage race. He finished a very creditable 7th overall and 5th in the Open Class. He had a big tilt at glory on the long 77km stage leading for some 40km before a broken chain cost him valuable time overall. Melanie recently competed in the World Cup MTBO Round in Sweden. Mel's report on her World Cup races recently: Yes, Swedish races were a bit mixed. The middle race was quite good, could have been better. The long was a bit of a debarcle for me. It was a mass start and I was kinda in the back of the lead pack up until control 6. On the way to 7 I made a rather large error with a lot of confidence and then when nothing fit it was much harder to work out what the hell was going on!! I was riding along a track checking off junctions, the last left hand junction was at the right angle for the junction before mine and then I paused confirmed that there was a depression on my left which was also before my junction, and I few onto the left hand turn just after the depression. Basically i had several features that confirmed my turn was the one I took, but the extra bit of information that I didn´t fully check was the direction. Bit of a fail. Anyway, had I looked closer the track that I had thought was the "junction before mine" was probably just a short cleared section that looked a bit like a track junction, but wasn`t, and there were two depressions - one before my junction and one just before the junction before mine. Very annoyed when I worked it out and stuffed up the next control by taking a bad route choice (that I also executed badly). And my results was further compounded by the fact that there was a cross country race going on behind the navigation of Michi up in the lead. (Lessons to be learnt here.) I even organised a local MTBO event - at a little of 70 degrees north, I think it must be a record. 45 competitors (which I think is a Norwegian record attendance) Keep posted!
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