Race Report

The conditions were a helluva lot better than more than 100 riders thought they were going to be this morning and yesterday. What's new? The fact that this was the lowest turnout we've had in many years is fairly new—26 riders lined up on the start line for Alison to count down with gaps between most of them long enough for both Alison and Sofia, her 'assistant' to go off and get numerous breakfasts and innumerable cups of coffee from the poor coffee vendor who had traipsed down to Champion Lakes to provide the service for us. 158 riders had registered for this event, 129 of them were still on the list a day or so ago. With so few riders on course, it was, nevertheless, a fairly relaxed affair.

But Patrick S-W and Matt Burton had their first energetic hit-out in open air for two weeks after returning from the 'Nationals'. But they didn't complain—you can get pretty wet sitting on a trainer, so they probably didn't even notice the stuff dripping out of the clouds. Lee Bolden and Steve Knight had great purpose and collected PBs as did Josh Commons and Mckenzie Wilson but the latter two seemed to simply stop after 4 laps rather than five, so I assumed it was intentional and they thought 'enough is enough' once they'd each achieved their target time for the usual distance. Ricky Thackray chose to ride a 29-er but he was too far away when on the start line for us to see what sort of tyres he was using and he was going too fast past the finish to let us have a good look.

So, what is there left to say but thank our army of helpers for their good-natured perseverance: Alison and Sofia; Heather Connan on the desk together with Matt whom she'd brought with her when expecting 130-odd people to be signing on; Lachlan watched the bridge crossing but there weren't too many people using that today either; Lenny and Jenny McIntyre were down at the southern reaches of the lake and Cheryl Dal Passo at the other extreme—the designated exit from the course. We had three of us in the timing tent: Steve Oates occasionally was required to press the button to manually record a time for the back-up and Kyla Gilbertson dutifully recorded bib numbers—118 of the 600 or so we had expected. Certainly, none of us was stressed by the intensity of the tasks demanded of us. And Paul Borrett and his partner (Deb) towed the trailer down there, set up the course and packed it away again once everyone had gone home.