Pukete Spaghetti

I'd been eyeing off this event for a couple of years but it always fell on the weekend of another race... This year, my weekend was free, so I trucked off down to Hamilton for a little 6 hour jaunt around Pukete Farm. It had been a while since I'd done a reasonable length race (although for some reason I keep forgetting the 4 days and 520km I rode around the Whanganui) and the running I started doing again this week meant it would test the legs a bit.

It was a beautiful day and we set off with a le mans start (thankfully, the shortest le mans start I have ever done!). The track is really twisty and windy, a bit like the Royal Albany trails, only a bit more open, so it took me a while to get into a rhythm railing the corners. After a couple of laps I settled into a good pace knocking off an average of just under 19km/hr for my first 3 hours! The trail was quite dusty and I think I had my tyres pumped up too hard making the ride a bit rough because by the end of the race, my lower back was killing me (it didn't even cross my mind to stop and let air out of them once I was in the zone)

There were a couple of highlights out on the lap... The first of these called the "poo shoot" which ran along the fenceline and was a flowy, almost straight piece of single track where I think my max speed hit 40km/hr... Lovely! There was also some sweet little berms to rail and even this one really sandy little berm where you could just slide straight into the sand and the berm would just spit you out pointing the right way. There was also this one little dip where you could get up quite a bit of speed and hit this lip that was almost vertical. I kept pushing my luck with my speed on that one until one lap, I got what felt like a good metre of air then nearly snapped my forks nose-diving into the track on the other side (phew!!! slowed down a bit after than one!). It was awesome fun, just corner after corner of sweet trail, although pretty hard work considering it was generally quite flat. I've always found it bizarre how people complain about climbing hills when at least it means you can ride down the other side... When you are racing on the flat, you have to be on the pedals the whole time with the hammer down.

There was another girl just ahead of me and for the first couple of laps, I managed to keep her within sight, but once I lost her, I think she took about a minute a lap out of me and in the end I came second behind her. After about the first 3 hours, my legs started to get a bit sooky from the running and lack of big rides, but I kept pushing out respectable lap times. I finished my last lap probably 5 minutes too late to be able to squeeze another in, but I was pretty happy with my day's riding and a second place result, pushing out just under 100km in about 5 hours and 40 minutes. Off to Karapoti next weekend! YEEEEEOOOOW!!!

Freeload Rack Review

When I headed off on my first cycle touring adventure a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have had Tim and the team at Freeload hook me up with one of their sturdy, versatile racks to carry my huge load on. I received my rack the week of the event (having left it too late like many other things) and although there was a bit of assembly to do, I was surprised at just how easily I was set up and on my way testing them out.

The assembly side of the freeload rack is just one of the things that makes it so versatile. The rack comes with the sport platform, but I replaced the sport platform with one of Freeload's new touring platforms with side supports for larger panniers. The touring platform gave me more room to strap stuff on the top and the racks allowed me to use a full-size Ortlieb pannier on the back. It also gave me HEAPS of options of where to strap things on, which is handy when you are packing up to go in the morning and you don't have to be so precious about how you pack things up. I set mine up on a hardtail mountain bike, but the design also works with a full-suspension bike. To my knowledge, it is the only rack on the market compatible with a full-suspension bike. The same rack I used on the back of my bike can also be set up on the front of the bike, so there's heaps of different options. The versatility was just one of the things I loved so much about the rack.

The one thing I was unsure of with the Freeload rack when I first put it on was how well it would stay put. I was carrying a lot of weight, and throwing it from side to side as I descended down trails and all I had to hold the whole thing on my bike was 4 bits of webbing around the chainstay??? I was seriously eating my words after day 2 of the tour, when I spent a good 2 hours hauling my bike and my load along a rough walking track, up slick rock and through muddy creek crossings and the Freeload rack stayed put the whole time. The only change I had to make to the rack in testing was that I had to strap the panniers around the rack to stop them swaying from side to side, although I think this had much more to do with the weight of my load than the design of the rack itself.

The other thing I was quite impressed with was that the Freeload rack looks noticeably cooler than any other rack on the market (and looking cool is important right?). The rack was reliable so I didn't need to worry about losing my load and at the end of the four days, the rack seemed to have withstood the battering much better than my body did!

All-in-all, I was highly impressed with my new Freeload rack. I think this will be the beginning of a new a beautiful relationship with my bike!

Palmerston North... Not as bad as it seems if you ride a bike!

A week ago, I made my first trip ever to Palmerston North. To be honest, I didn't expect much... Everyone promised me I would be sufficiently bored by the end of the weekend and vow never to return, but my partner is studying down there and the trip was a necessary evil, so I packed my bike in the van and off I went.

As I approached Palmy, I was quite taken by what I was confronted with... Beautiful rolling hillsides and mountain ranges... I began frothing at the mouth over what riding might be hiding in those hills and even the prospect of a road ride up through the hills just outside the town.

Saturday I took my partner for a drive east to Waipukurau in Hawke's Bay and we checked out Pukeora Mountain Bike Park. This is a 50 hectare block littered with probably about 15km of Rotorua-esque trails... Dips and berms carved into sweet, smooth trails... Man, it was so much fun. This was probably about an hour and a half out of Palmy, so a nice little day trip with some sweet little towns to stop for lunch or a coffee on the way through. Just remember that if you would like to ride here, you need to be a member of Hawkes Bay MTB club, or you need to purchase a temp permit from the cafe just down the road (we were quite surprised at how easy it was to just rock up and grab a permit... Nice!)

The next day, I headed out on a little adventure of my own to tackle Takapari Road. This is a 4WD track that winds up the back of the Ruahines and climbs up to a height of about 1200m. The first 7km climbs 900m to hit the peak of the climb and then it undulates along the ridgeline and you just turn back when you feel like it. The first thing I saw when I threw my bike over the gate was this wall in front of me which was actually the road ascending up the mountains... there were some super steep sections and a lot of these had obviously just had gravel re-layed on them so they were super slippery to climb. I learnt pretty quickly that if I wanted to get anywhere without pushing my bike, I had to ride really smoothly. I stopped a couple of times on the way up for some photos and noticed that as I got higher, it got much colder and the weather at the top of the climb was completely different to at the bottom of the climb. This was less noticeable on the way up than on the way down. When I was bombing back down the hill, I was certain I had passed through four seasons in the space of half an hour. Up along the top ridge line, there was an A-frame hut and beyond here, the road actually got quite rough and technical. I'd be pretty keen to head up here again and go as far as the road does. It was a hard ride up but the views were amazing, and the ride down was good fun.

So from now on, the bike comes with me when I trip down to Palmy for visits. Looking forward to scoping the area out more!