Work to Do!

So today was a training exercise for the Dirtworks 100Km race. Although it was a blast think it showed there's a lot of work to do. And while you can clock up 50Km plus rather easily around Terrey Hills/Cascades/etc. there's nothing much like a trip to GNR/Womerah to remind us what real hills are!

We rode part of the course from around the 70Km stage forward first, then looped about a bit to ride in reverse from 65Km-ish out and back-ish.

The profile in case you didn't see it on the ride page:

http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/episode/view....

Positives first: On a personal note was pretty pleased with technical aspects, having rode the lot. Every last Womerah hill (amazing how 'easy' they are without 70-80Km in the legs ), Shepherds Gully climb without a dab, most of the GNR tech. the same way. Fun, fun, fun! When we were moving the overall pace was also good - if we could keep that pace for 100Km it'd be under 6h30 finish.

But the bad news is... I was completely stuffed afterwards and had some nasty feelings of nausea on GNR. Nothing that couldn't be overcome by blasting over rocks but didn't feel too good when standing around fixing mechanicals. OK, during the DW race wouldn't want to go that fast obviously (well, some of us wouldn't ) but still, the prospect of adding another 40Ks of similar terrain (yeah, we did about 60% of the distance and also about 60% of the vertical, so don't kid yourself those two climbs made this ride somehow more vertically impressive) to this route was not at all appealing. Soooo... there's defo work to do... well, for me at least!