Lost against car...

I went out for an easy spin on Friday morning, it was cold but clear. I was only 10 minutes from home, when a car waiting at a give way pulled out right into me. Luckily, my courier instincts kicked in. I was directly in front of her when I heard the rev of the engine, I tried everything to get out of the way, I sprinted and moved into the middle of the road. Basically, these actions reduced the severity of my injuries. I got my legs out of the way, leaving the rear of the bike to take the impact. This flicked me over the bars, landing on my back, left shoulder first. So my shoulder (still undiagnosed) is very sore and my right thumb very bruised. I see myself as very luck, but guess what the driver said, "sorry I didn't see you". Very poor excuse. There was nothing impeding her view, I was wearing a standout, white Look kit and hey, I'm not exactly small.

My poor bike didn't fair so well. Barely a month old and written off. Boo.

It's back to the doctors today to see if we can figure out what is happening to my shoulder. There was little to no improvement over the weekend with complete rest (thanks to Robyn for looking after everything). I have cancelled my plans to race the Merida 24 hour next month, but hopefully I am back riding within a few weeks.

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.

Traveling done, let's race

We smashed out 1000km yesterday, only a few 100 today and we will be
in Blinman ready for race start tomorrow at 7:30am.

This pic is of Wilpena Pound. A very beautiful part of Australia.