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By
James Downing
on
9/5/2012
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Round 5 of the Real Insurance XCM series was held on the 1st of September up in Wollombi. This is west of Newcastle pretty much on the other side of the mountain of where the Convict 100 is held. OK, so that might be a bit of a stretch, but it's within 100km of that location.
On Friday, Kylie and I loaded up the Kluger and hit the road for the four and a half hour cruise up north. We took the scenic Peats Ridge Road down direct to Wollombi to check out the tourist drive and scenic surroundings.
Driving down into Wollombi we crossed an ancient bridge which, according to a plaque, stated that it was made by convict labour back in the 1800's. That was pretty cool.
The trip made me wonder what people do out there. I mean, this is about 90 minutes from Newcastle and Sydney. Apart from farming, what do you do? I guess you could be retired, running/hiding from the law, or doing some shady undertakings. It was pretty remote to say the least.
I'd made two predictions for the weekend. First one was that the race could be done in 2 hours and 31 minutes. The second one came after the Saturday morning road bunch ride where Andy Blair was riding 'like a man possessed' to quote Phil Liggett. After that ride, I logged onto Centrebet and put $1000 on 'Manly Flair' for the win.
We hooked up with the Radical Factory Team boys for a bit of course recce late Friday afternoon. We scouted the first bit all the way up to the KOM point. Seemed like 4% over 5km like the profile displayed. NOT! There were some cool 15% stem chewing gradients out there that would take a bit of sting out of the legs, and, as we predicted, would pretty much be the initial selection point.
After regrouping at the bottom of the decent, we were amazed by three train carriages covered in moss, totally in the middle of nowhere. There was a dog outside the nearby house and eerily enough, after saying hello to him, he just stared at me blankly. Not even a woof. Garry went for a look inside one of the carriages, not exactly sure what for though. Far off in the distance, we could hear some banjos playing, a cold wind blew through and we decided collectively to get the hell out of dodge. Pretty freaky!
We then drove back to Cessnock for a night at the Cumberland Motel. This turned out to be a pretty cool spot. Not bad for $113. Huge rooms, plenty of room for all the associated crap that you take to a bike race.
Where we decided to go for dinner, however, was a bit of a fail. We went for some pasta carbonara which seemed like a decent choice on the menu. It wa,s however, more carbonara than pasta and as Andrew Hall so eloquently put it 'looked like something my dog threw up'. The Rad Team boys wisely went to a local Thai restuarant. Kylie was not keen for the pasta, so put in a mercy call to Andrew for some emergency Pad Thai to bring back.
 Dinner. Kind of.
After getting a decent night's sleep (for a race) I was up before the alarm and we were soon on the road to Wollombi munching on banana bread for breakfast. Being a Canberran I am pretty used to the cold, but it never gets easier. To say it was a bit fresh would be a slight understatement. Warm up was a relative term used for a process of going through the motions. For a fleeting moment, I thought of even racing in arm and leg warmers, but ultimately, I thought a cup of HTFU would be more appropriate.
At 8:10am, we were off. A totally stacked Elite men's field scampered to get out of the start chute and get the race on. With a fair bit of fire road on offer for four or so kilometres before the climb started the pace was the usual up and down pace depending on who was on the front. As soon as we hit the steep climb, the fireworks started going off. Blairy and Trenton Day flexed their climbing muscles and were off. I looked around and could see Lewis, Morris, Hall, Hughes, Glennan, English, Fleming, Shippard, Jackson and a few others. This was OK, pretty much who I expected to be there at this stage.
After the third climb we were through the KOM point and in for some descending. We weren't let down. I hit 80.7km/h fully tucked down a super awesome descent. As usual, these never last long enough and you realise that it usually means another block of climbing. This next climb however, was not as steep as the initial climbs, and was more like a 4% true gradient. The pace was high, everyone was still there, and we were only 16km into the race.
There were a few interestingly marked corners where we had already blown through a wrong turn. A bit to do with the head of the race and a bit to do with ambiguity of signage. At around the 35km mark, I could sense Jason English starting to get a bit twitchy and got on his wheel. We saw a black arrow and took the left...to a dead end. We called back to the group 'wrong way' and proceeded along the fire trail again. Again, about five minutes later English and Troy Glennan started to up the pace going up a slight rise.
I was sitting on Hall's wheel and noticed that the pace was starting to rise and could feel no one sitting on my wheel. It was time to up the pace myself and get over to that train that was about to leave. Pretty soon, we had a gap, and it was not being brought back. A couple of minutes later we saw Blair and Day heading back towards us!! Oh yeah, this was the dual direction bit of the course. A minute later, we had our 180 degree turn. Luckily this allowed us to see the pack that was still chasing hard. So Troy ramped the pace. After about the 46km mark, I was dangling a little off the back of English and Glennan having lost contact by about 50 metres and falling into no man's land. I knew though that all of the climbing was complete and worked hard for a minute or so to get back onto the wheels of the two motors in front of me.
After dropping back down to the lowlands beside the creek, we were now hauling at 40km/hr working equally as a group to keep the pace high. We hit a few of the creeks and were met with some freezing cold water that made the legs feel a little bit shorter! Now I could probably beat Glennan in a limbo contest and definitely beat English in a 'smooth legs' stand off, but today like most days, I was not beating them on the bike. Glennan attacked and I just worked hard to minimise the losses rolling in for 5th place. Andy Blair had taken the win from Trenton Day, with English and Glennan 3rd and 4th respectively.
Drama unfolded 2 minutes after I crossed the line with a bunch of about five riders trying to hit the narrow entrance for the finish chute at the same time. Out of the cloud of dust, Andrew Hall led through Justin Morris whilst the others picked themselves up off the ground. I was pretty stoked with the top five result and as a bonus my time was 2 hours 31 which was not too bad a call from my earlier prediction in the week. It worked out at an average speed of 29.8km/h which for a mountain bike race was pretty quick. Blairy finished in a time of 2:27. He was flying.
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