I think my days of retro racing at the Karapoti are over. The course was the roughest Ive ever seen. It consists of 3 x 250 metre granny gear climbs. The first was mostly a walk for me. The undulations after the 1st climb were slippery damp and mossy rock. The gnarly rock garden descent was also a walk on my rigid 26er. The devils staircase climb was also mostly walking. The big ring boulevard high speed descent was really rough and my tires were super hard, I carried 3 spare tubes, such is the risk of puncturing. The final climb, Dopers, was the only bit I really enjoyed. Steep as hell but dry and smooth.
I dont recall ever being this tired after an event. It was the 40th anniversary of the event started by the mtb pioneers the Kennett Brothers . I came second to Simon Kennett in the retro class.There were only 4 of us, for good reason. We were about 20 seconds into the race when Simon realises hes lost his phone already so he back tracked and found it after the first river crossing. He caught me a couple of hours later on the Devils Staircase and was nice enough to take this photo.
Simons bike was a custom build in 1984 by Ken Mcintosh, the famed builder of the Mcintosh Suzuki frames that dominated superbike racing in NZ BITD. No one knows if he ever built another bicycle frame.
Simon was responsible for introducing the bikepacking thing into NZ with the 2010 Kiwi Brevet, having completed the Great Divide event in 2008. Was great catching up with a lot of old faces.
Rode up to Mt Lukens on Saturday with the intent of descending Haines Canyon, a fireroad I’ve climbed a handful of times, but never descended. The climb up was beautiful, under cloud cover, and pleasant temperature up to ~4000ft then above the clouds to for the top 1000ft of the climb. Hung out up high for a minute basking in the sunlight, then proceeded to blast down Haines at irresponsible speeds. The descent is pretty open and non-technical, but definitely pretty chunky. About 1000ft down, it felt like I clipped a pedal on a babyhead, then a few minutes later I realized my rear was flat. Stopped, tried to find the source, but no dice. The bead was all the way on, no gashes/slashes/punctures, but the tire was not holding any air at all. Eventually realized that I’d blown a spoke and that it likely punctured the rim tape and nothing I had with me would remedy that. Rode my insert the rest of the 2000ft down to the road, then hopped on a bus to get back to my truck.
Took the Vaya on dirt paths through a local reserve. The weather is ‘false spring’ nice, 10ºC so everyone’s out, and I only needed arm and leg warmers and a regular jersey.
Also showing off the custom Restrap frame bag that’s now on the bike full time.
Gravel is more difficult than I expected it to be. I went to DuPont this morning, felt like I kind of knew what to expect since we use these roads all the time to transfer between singletrack on the MTB, but it’s a whole different experience on 35mm tires and drop bars. 3 hours of mostly dirt, with some godawful sections of loose large rock.
Fenders on a gravel bike are a cute idea but I won’t run them again. No actual issues but they were very noisy and I was worried about catching a rock in the front the whole time.
finally did a tandumb ride for the first time in like 6 months
only thing preventing us from riding it was that we poached the saddle for some other bike, so now we have matchy matchy chairs.
Just did some local loops here. Nothing too exciting. Took in some of the Skyline and Te Ahumairangi tracks. Tried to keep in the bush most of the time cos windy.
