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Sounds great, keen to know for next year.
Still looking forward to it, the transitions are still excellent riding terrain, but chum3 has summed it up perfectly. Seems to be more dh orinentated than originally billed. Enduro bias in an endurance event. Having said that this is only in terms of the number of times stages. In terms of elapsed time the xc stages will definitely account for the vast majority of the timed 'time', as i'm guessing they are mostly uphill. Overall i think you will gain more time in a swift uphill than a banzie 'short' downhill.
Can't wait to get there.
Getting excited too- I think I'm going with the more XC bike, it was fine for the Dyfi, and I'd appreciate the lighter weight and gearing! If anyone is taking multiple vehicles, it'd be good to know, and I reckon petrol money could be saved!? I'd like to have access to my car in the later stages, just to go and source extra food...!
I unpicked most of the stages last night, and I'm sticking with the Anthem 29 rather than swapping to the bigger bike. I was leaning towards the xc anyway, and a spin around BPW last weekend proved it pretty capable.
Life has done its usual thing of getting in the way of biking!!
Not had a chance to look at the route, not ridden for over a week and struggling to get stuff packed/checked etc....
None of the above really matter... still excited and a touch nervous.
Roll on Saturday.
getting excited.....
bike fettled - new headset bearing, chain, cassette, chain ring, pedals tweaked and greased, reverb bled,
will call in on chipps - have you got the electric fat bike again? I'll be a big bloke on with no mates on a Pyga ......
Just deciding what/how many spares/bits to bring...
Bit nervous now - I havent ridden MTB for 4 weeks and am carrying excess croissant/camemebert from holidays.
Pivot went on bike a few weeks ago and and no spares available until at least next week. Fortunately shop have lent me a "5" for the event but only picking it up Saturday AM so first time riding it will be Saturday prologue. I will dream up a few more excuses for slowness as we go but that will do for now !
Will there be any beers available at the 2 sites or do I need to get rid of some energy gel ballast/clothes and pack the real essentials ?
I am guessing i'll be getting to know you over the course of the week Tex.... god I hope there is beer!!
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm officially cheering for Mo Man Fai from here onwards. Such a solid foundation to improve from, I'm raising a beer to him now.
Joe Murray racing !!!
And doddy doing well !
I thought Mark Weir was supposed to be there?
That's not Doddy - it's Andy Dodds - Scottish Trek rep.
Aahh, was expecting some epic endurance/enduro gurning on the photos
Does that make chips fastest MTB journo?
Oh no, mate bust his lefty, no one could fix it had to pull out !
Your mate was lucky - at least he got a ride - I had to pull out before I even started - lifted up my race bag to load into the van to get to the event and something went in my lower back. I can just about walk properly now.
To say I am gutted is a bit of an understatement. Hoping the event is a big success and is on next year since I have some unstarted business !
Tex - sorry to hear that, terrible luck. We can both give it a decent crack next year!
Well yesterday's 6km prologue was 'kin hard work with about 450m climbing packed in
Today much better. 3 times stages, first was about 1km up then the penhydd descent - I think it was about 11 mins ish. Second was the wall climb up to where the bunkhouse are and was a killer - 15 ish mins. Third was the wall descent. 52kms with 1500 m climbing
Tomorrow promises a 13km uphill stage (yikes) but it's okay because team "oh alright then" including me and chipps have just won the tug of war competition - only thing either of us are going to come close to winning....
I mean 6 mile ish prologue!
As someone that would be more interested in the DH sections than the timed ups, is there much queuing/follow the train on the DH bits?
Watching the Vids there looks like a bit but not as much as an XC race.
Scott, Joel and Harny have gone out each day ~ 20mins after the official start, focused on the trail king & queen rather than overall. That way they're getting clean (well nearly) runs.
I like the sound of that!
In the middle of the field it was fairly easy to queue at the timing start points and leave a reasonable gap before heading into sections. Still caught a fair few people on longer runs but on the whole passing worked out OK, there were only a couple of times I was held up a bit.
Scott- as Ben said, it's easy to hang back and focus on the trail king sections; after the first day we took a steady pace on the neutral stuff and rode the timed sections with no hold-ups. We took the appearance of the Bird contingent at the end of a run as a signal to get moving!
It was properly wet today though, so keeping the pace up was a better idea- pretty cold otherwise.
However, the whole event has been fantastic, real total riding challenge! Epic/Enduro in all senses! (A few more pure descent stages would have been good though!)
Check out this slideshow from yesterday