Ah, youthful exuberence! That was a real hiding you gave to the rollers during your warm-up Luke. But, perhaps you were then just a bit too impetuous - you ruined an otherwise beautiful ride of perfectly uniform lap times by going too fast in the first lap. You could still have broken the record by 10sec and posted the fastest time if you had just slowed by 12 sec in that first blast around the circuit. Nevertheless, an average speed of 46.0km/h isn't too bad I guess - a nice round number; no untidy decimal bits. But, of course you wouldn't have done that if you'd settled for a 5:40min first lap. Seriously now, it was another great ride Luke.
 Matt Illingworth of course didn't disappoint us and pruned his existing course record and therefore held yet another new record - at least for a while today: 9:41.1min in fact. As you'd expect, Matt's lap times were impressively uniform too. Nicky Armstrong also posted a course record - for Penny-farthings. More importantly, a PB by almost a minute shows she's well and truly back in form.

But the biggest PB of the day was 'Bec Halliday's: better than 5min. Fastest girl again today was Anna Kauffmann who was obviously so preoccupied with the ride she was going to do she forgot to attach her timing transponder to the bike. But we found times for her amongst the backups. Prize for the most novel excuse for arriving late on the start line went to Claire McLean. The excuse was what was delicately described by Neilly as a 'wardrobe malfunction'. Whatever that means it didn't stop Claire from posting a PB.

The big record of the day was the number of non-starters. Sixty four people who had pre-registered at some stage didn't make it to the start line. That's pretty disappointing but there does seem to be a considerable spate of winter ills and injury.

On the other hand a few of those who were on the injured list were amongst the people we had as helpers. Roger Hales was one. He was our starter for the day. Marshalling the various corners were Cam Berg and Andrew Mackie, Fred Cottier, Brad Woodbrook and John Innes. Susie organised them all as usual and made sure of the weather. It might have been a bit nippy but it was a beautiful morning. Thanks Susie. Nat Roberts rode and then gave her legs some easy recovery kms ferrying results back to the board. Lorraine of course was there from before dawn, handed over the registrations desk to Neilly and Susie, had a ride and then returned to keep things on track until we abandoned McGillivray for the day. Neilly had made the trip up from Koji so he could stir Susie but also remind himself of what needs to be done to organise an event; which is precisely what he's doing in October. So who's going down to Kojonup to check out whether he's still any good at it?
 Thanks, everyone.

mouse