La Sportiva are selling top quality off road runners in NZ. I am trying their Fireblade trail runners and the Cross lite off road runners. Both awesome shoes but I am most impressed with the Crosslite's. Grip like nothing I've ever tried.
Saturday 2 July 2011
New Sponsors - Hard to come by but worth it!
La Sportiva are selling top quality off road runners in NZ. I am trying their Fireblade trail runners and the Cross lite off road runners. Both awesome shoes but I am most impressed with the Crosslite's. Grip like nothing I've ever tried.
Kaiteriteri 6hr Mountainbike
Thinking I had missed a great opportunity to race on Kaiteriteri's newly developing mountainbike park while at heights of winter I received a nice surprise. The proposed 6hr race had been postponed a week due to seriously crap weather. Brilliant...no excuses now.
As the day began we were treated to a typical Nelson frosty morning along with magical blue skies. The event started with a quick ride on tar seal alongside the estuary before turning into the mountainbike park and some amazing intermediate single track riding. Being a Solo rider and having taken the last 3 weeks off riding my goal was "preservation". With this in mind I got into a rhythm riding with biking guru Nick Ross (pronounced woss). We soon realised that although amazing riding, great trails, pleasant company yada yada yada that there was a lot of uphill making for a very challenging course for Solo riders. To put the day into a couple of sentences, there was a lot of ups and downs, Nick unfortunately had a mechanical after 3 hours cutting him out of the running, and I was not that dissapointed when I missed the cutoff for a final lap by a few minutes. I spent the day establishing myself into 2nd place and finished about 15mins off the pace from a formidable Tom Filmer.
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A big thanks to the guys from Nelson mountainbike club for organising a top day. My legs were toast but it made for a really satisfying day. If you haven't already done so, check out the Kaiteriteri mountainbike park. Its worth the trip!
As the day began we were treated to a typical Nelson frosty morning along with magical blue skies. The event started with a quick ride on tar seal alongside the estuary before turning into the mountainbike park and some amazing intermediate single track riding. Being a Solo rider and having taken the last 3 weeks off riding my goal was "preservation". With this in mind I got into a rhythm riding with biking guru Nick Ross (pronounced woss). We soon realised that although amazing riding, great trails, pleasant company yada yada yada that there was a lot of uphill making for a very challenging course for Solo riders. To put the day into a couple of sentences, there was a lot of ups and downs, Nick unfortunately had a mechanical after 3 hours cutting him out of the running, and I was not that dissapointed when I missed the cutoff for a final lap by a few minutes. I spent the day establishing myself into 2nd place and finished about 15mins off the pace from a formidable Tom Filmer.
Friday 1 July 2011
Heights of Winter Rogaine - 18th June
Well being defending champs Nathan and I had a fair idea we would be watched closely this year. The day began as per usual with a route planning session in the Culverden school hall. Its not normal for a team to obtain every control on a Rogaine map, in fact usually the top team will nail about 75% of them. This map looked different. At a glance it looked possible to collect the lot in which case the top team would be the ones to collect them the quickest. So.....we planned our path with this in mind, setting hourly targets as a guide to see if we were on track.
And heres what actually happened in short form...
We fell short by miles! But it didn't become apparent until well into the allocated 12hours. We had a great time in daylight, collecting everthing possible. Come 6pm however darkness provided some hefty challenges. The only features that could be relied on were the contours (rather difficult to make out). Marked streams were swamps and hard to distinguish, all man made features were inaccurate (except pilons) and we were on the foothills/ river flats so contours themelves were hard to judge. So in summary we lost major ground at night and ultimately the ability to defend our title. It came down in the end to strategical errors namely too much time wasted for small points early in the day and we left ourselves too much challenging navigation for the dark hours.
Safe to say we'll be back again next year much more the wiser! Check out the worm below. It tells a great story of the day. Many thanks to La Sportiva for providing me with crosslite shoes which provided insane grip on the grassy hillsides and amazing comfort. Legend Rogaine shoes I have to say.
![]()
And heres what actually happened in short form...
We fell short by miles! But it didn't become apparent until well into the allocated 12hours. We had a great time in daylight, collecting everthing possible. Come 6pm however darkness provided some hefty challenges. The only features that could be relied on were the contours (rather difficult to make out). Marked streams were swamps and hard to distinguish, all man made features were inaccurate (except pilons) and we were on the foothills/ river flats so contours themelves were hard to judge. So in summary we lost major ground at night and ultimately the ability to defend our title. It came down in the end to strategical errors namely too much time wasted for small points early in the day and we left ourselves too much challenging navigation for the dark hours.
Safe to say we'll be back again next year much more the wiser! Check out the worm below. It tells a great story of the day. Many thanks to La Sportiva for providing me with crosslite shoes which provided insane grip on the grassy hillsides and amazing comfort. Legend Rogaine shoes I have to say.
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