Capital Punishment

Better late than never, I though I'd best add an entry for my first MTB event.

After being convinced to enter Capital Punishment in a rush of group testosterone at work it dawned on me that I'd never ridden a MTB in anger and that my rigid Giant Boulder commuter (hereafter known as The Shitter) might be out of its depth for this event. Fortunately my mate Deon offered to lend me his bike and he would ride his SS for the event.

I did a couple of laps of Manly Dam on The Shitter to get the feel for offroad riding and really started to take a shine to it (I'd done a lot of motocross as a kid so don't mind it a bit slippy).

Still appropriately clueless I rocked up in Canberra for the event, did the rego, and went to get the bike sorted. A whole bunch of issues, replaced parts and a late night and we were ready to go with a well fancy titanium framed hardtail complete with CF forks and the best of everything.

Starting in the pissing rain it looked like it would be a bleak day but certainly got better. Lacking any experience as to what was an appropriate pace for a 50k event I just rode at the fast end of comfortable, making sure at all times there was enough background pain to mean I wasn't slacking off. A couple of crashes in quick succession (one wet root and one talent failure) in Majura added some real pain to the mix but that was quickly forgotten in the heat of the moment.

The middle section of the ride was pretty uneventful before the quagmire approaching Stromlo. After that the ascent up Stromlo was getting hard and I was certainly feeling a bit second hand. By this stage I was stuck in one gear (fortunately a pretty good one for the ascent) and the brakes were gone which added a lot of speed to my run down the mountain.

In the end I was very happy with my time and result, a lot better than I expected as a first time plonker. The bike was pretty trashed (in-joke: that's pay-back for the Ducati mate) so I owe Deon a huge debt of gratitude. I've now got the bug big-time and am getting around the dam every weekend on The Shitter whilst shopping around for a real bike.