The weekend brought a few of us a Saturday 4 / 8-hour mountain biking enduro event out at Sandy Point MTB Tracks. This is a well-organised event run by the Southland Mountain Bike Club, supported by local MTB enthusiasts and sponsored by Wensley’s Cycles & 2 Tyre Tracks
Starting at 11 am running through to 7 pm, the goal is to ride as many laps of the designated course over the allocated time period.
We were completely roughing it for the day as we set up next to the Forage & Graze “pumpkin Soup and Granola Stand” girls…
…in our “mini Marque” HQ, consisting of a:
- mobility area for stretching,
- an Airdyne Bike for warming up and
- some bike racks for our bikes
all supplied by CrossFit Wild South - plus Stacys Gas Brazier for the much-needed heat source.
We also had a table, a ground sheet and an Internet-connected laptop for tracking the boy’s team via GPS in realtime as they rode (Jason is such a geek!).
We were lucky to get a reasonably good day for the event, the sun was out for a good part of it, unfortunately disappearing just after 4 pm, dark by 5:30 pm and obviously being winter, it got fairly ‘bloody’ cold towards the evening.
There were three teams in our HQ set up,
- Jasons Team, 3 of us boys riding the 8-hour
Kaths Team, 4 ladies riding the 8-hour, &- Pete (Debbie Ballantynes Pete & Olivia), in a mixed team of 4 riding the 4-hour
The MTB track itself was just under 10 km in length and the course was split over several individual tracks, the tracks were taped off so that they flow together and you couldn’t get lost.
Some teams were quite serious (I’m not sure if we were serious)
Our main intention was to just have a blast, it went like this:
Ride the course – come back, your next rider goes out, so you go and
- eat a BBQ lamb sandwich from Emerson’s Brewery
- drink a Coffee
- Do some stretching
- Pretend to do some maintenance on your Bike
- Warm up on the Airdyne Bike.
- Put on your bike helmet, Tag in and go ride another lap again.
Eat, Stretch – Repeat
You could only have one rider from your team on the course at a time. We were electronically being tracked via some cool things from Sports Southland, but we had to pass a “wrist” bracelet to our next riders as a Batten. (like a relay)
Transition of the Elites of the Elites of elite-ville
The Girls Came first in their category taking home some cool medals. – 12 Laps
Pete’s team came 5th in theirs – 5 Laps
And our Boy team came like 21st in our Category – 14 Laps (1st place team did 18 laps)
Just to give you some perspective on how BIKE FIT some of these riders were on the course
The fastest course lap time was 24 mins 8 seconds
(comparison to my own best time of 31 mins 56 seconds)
There were solo riders that rode continuously over the whole 8 hours
Women’s Vet – 15 laps
Men’s Vet – 15 Laps
15 Laps is 145km!!!
Some actual Stats from the day:
- Course Lap distance:9.81km
- 8-hour teams: 104
- 4-hour teams: 85
- 8-hour solos: 12
- 4-hour solos:55
- Total number of riders: 1271
- Total combined distance rode that day: 12,328km
We’d be keen for next year, you should join us.
You just need to be able to ride a bike to do this event. It is a good confidence builder, heaps of fun and has a slight hint of competitiveness.
But you don’t need to be a crazy competitive Athlete, just ride and have some fun.
