The 2010 rendition of the Jet Black 12hr saw the event moved from Yarramundi National Park to Dargle Farm which is about 30 mins drive north west of Windsor, Sydney. The move was required due to the national park restricting the number of competitors which were allowed to be entered into the event. Due to the popularity of this event, this number was almost tripled, so a change in venue was required. The last time this track was used was in 2007 for the then Sydney 24hr run by Bright Orange Events which I was competed in as a team of 4. From what I remember, the track layout this year was very similar to that which was used 3 years ago, a good mixture of tight, technical single trail, open, transitional fire access roads and fast, hair raising descents.
On arrival to the event centre on Saturday morning, I met up with Craig Baylis, Michael Crummy and Jamie Bailey from Team Enduro Pulse and they had generously invited me to join them in their pit area. The event centre was a buzz and with world class riders such as Jason English racing, we all knew that this was going to be a long day and particularly fast at the pointy end of the field.
With my preparation completed, we all lined up at the start line. As occurred last year, the raced started 20mins late but this was all forgotten once we got underway. There was a mad rush to the first piece of single trail, a bottle neck, but this soon cleared with the field spreading out and we all got into our race rhythm. The new bike, Merida 96 HFS, was going really well for it's first official outing and with some suspension tweaking required, I am certainly going to be very happy with the package.
I was getting along at a comfortable but higher than anticipated intensity for the first 6 laps and this would prove to be a very big error of judgment on my part. At about the 5hr mark, I really started to suffer badly. I backed off the intensity for a couple of laps but at the end of this lap would see me stop to try and recover a little. Three more hours and I was done for the day, having dug myself into a hole that I wasn't able to recover from. So at 8.5hrs I called it quits, certainly not the result I was after but the decision was made in the interests of self preservation.
I certainly learned a lot from this race, of worthy note are the following:
Make sure you have a race plan and stick to the plan. Preferably, have a crew that can monitor this plan and make sure you stick to it,
Ensure you and the bike are set up and prepared for an endurance event. As good as the new bike is, I just was not used to a pure XC race bike. So my advice is if you are progressing from an All Mountain bike to a XC bike or changing race bikes in general, make sure you get some quality time in the new cockpit. A slightly different body position takes time to become accustomed too and I think this also may have attributed to my early withdrawal.
In closing I must say a big thank you to the Enduro Pulse guys for supporting me during the event, Rocky Trail Entertainment and Western Sydney Mountain Bike Club for running the event and Dargle Farm for allowing the mountain biking community back onto a sweet piece of race track.
Cheers, Mick Smith
Check out the newly arranged Product Reviews for Mick’s thoughts on his new bike.
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