Sunday, June 13, 2010

Mawson Marathon...

What a race. I had no idea what to expect from myself at this one. I
knew the distance would be ok, but was a little worried about the pace
I would need to maintain to hold onto the quick boys. We (Jason and I)
made the tactical decision to let Chis and Brett go off the front
early on. The pace they were sitting on seemed a little quick for suck
a long race. We sat up and waited for the Torq boys (Fenner and Mark
T) so we could use them to our advantage on the long road streaches.
This seemed to work well, 4 man team time trial style. Little did we
know Brett and Chris had swapped to bikes setup for time trialing. All
out efforts were no match. Their lead went out to about 20 minutes by
about the half way mark. Buy this stage we had left the Torq boys,
they were both have very slight bad patches, which they rode through
and avoided loosing anymore time.

We tried as hard as we could, but any time we made up on Brett and
Chris didn't seem to last. Jason pulled me along nicely towards the
end as we thought an attact was coming from behind. In the end we were
2nd, in a bit over 14hrs for the 367kms, about 15mins behind Brett and
Chris and about 7 mins up on team Torq in third.

Logistically it was one of the toughest races I have competed it. But
every time I got to the end of my bidon, there was Randall with a
fresh one. He never missed a beat and we could not have done it
without him. Thanks Ben. Also, thanks to Jason. We normally race
against each other and it was a pleasant change to have him on my
side. We seemed to work well together on this very challenging course
for differant reasons than both of use are used to.

I will add photos soon, we are still travelling home.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gday Andy, Steve Partridge here, freelance writer for Enduro Magazine. Are you interested in commenting on the Mawsom MTB Marathon for an article for Enduro Mag? If so, you can contact me steveap@optusnet.com.au or through Enduro Mag. Hope to hear from you,
Steve