Brian's blog

I'll start with wow, what a hard race. Below also includes the week before as we had a few descent rides up there in the week leading to the race.

Originally I wasn't gong to do this and just focus on the XCM series. As the XCM series announcement kept getting delayed I decided I would have a crack at this. I was already signed up for the Wombat but once they announced there was no series Dicko and I decided to pull out of the Wombat and head up a week early.

As the date came closer I was excited about the whole trip, a weeks riding and then the race.

This was my first race where I got to the start and had bike issues. The bike was fine Friday morning but the morning of the race I had no back brake. I tried pumping it but nothing, decided to throw a new set of pads to see if it would help just a little and nothing. Kept pumping the lever and bang, it improved. There must be a bubble somewhere but for the rest of the race it was fine

I've been training pretty hard in the last few months for this and I've actually already doubled my 2011 total kilometres in 2012 so I've really been at it all year.

This was the my last marathon for 2012 so I was keen to finish off strong and I'm pretty happy how it went today.

Despite all the talk of how easy this race is, that was tough.

Lined up at the start to hear the riders briefing. No closed roads, stay left and be careful, remember there are sections that have on coming riders etc. The elites didn't go off first in a separate group and everyone just started together. The pace seemed comfortable to start with and then we hit the first hill. I walked a little bit as traction was an issue for me. I also started the race with a sore back and I was just waiting for the panadeine to kick in.

I did the Singleton 3 Hour today.

A big thank you to the local trail builders and HMBA. For $10 you get an awesome track, awesome organisation and the results have already been posted. What more could you want

This was my first race I've averaged over 20km/h

http://app.strava.com/rides/13422079

Results Here

http://www.hmba.asn.au/files/Results/2012/Race%2...

I think the race organisers did a much better job this year. The track was marked better, race central work well, access the the RSL toilets and somewhere to keep warm in the morning was nice as well.

Also, thanks to the local club SCUM (http://www.scum.asn.au/) for providing awesome single track. It would be awesome to be able to link the trails around the massive bog holes because for me these we just too much.

This was the race I was aiming for in 2012. Having done this the previous two years in 2010 taking 07:32:53 and 2011 06:27:49 my goal for this year was 05:30:00.

With the Capital Punishment being rescheduled this meant I had the Wombat 100, then the Capital Punishment and then the Convict 100 all in consecutive weekends. This meant not only going for my goal time I was backing up from two other races.

http://www.cyclenation.com.au/results/ranklist.a...

I thought I would just keep track via screen shots of how I'm going after the races. I missed doing this after the Wombat 100.

After the Capital Punishment I'm in the top ten so for males

There's also a couple of other nobmobers there

**Edit 10th May**

This was my first Capital Punishment. It looks like I picked the perfect year for weather and track conditions as both were brilliant. Its a bit of a weird race with such a big untimed section. I used this to get water and have a bit of a rest. Due to the single track at the start a really suffered in the last 40km as I didn't eat enough in the beginning.

Apart from a massive OTB on the Luge I quite enjoyed this one. A shame that the results are delayed but I have my unofficial time of around 04:37:00 taking out the untimed section.

That was definitely the hardest 100 I have done. On the Hardtail with so much technical singletrack I am stoked with my time. We had rain the night before so the pine forest singletrack was very greasy.

Even though this was the hardest 100 I've done it was also one of the most relaxing. The 900km drive each way didn't seem that big. I headed down Friday morning with Wayne arriving Friday afternoon. Checked in at Cammeray Waters as I had a room in where race central was. We unloaded the car and then headed out to have dinner with Wayne, Paul and Anthony.