Here it is, the long-awaited video from the 2010 Eagle 6 Hour Enduro. This is the complete 49 minute lap compressed into 10 minutes, so some parts have been slightly sped up.

The last race of the 2009/2010 AMTBC Summer Series was yesterday.  The race was held at Flinders University on some of the trails near car park no. 3.

This was the first time I had ridden on these trails at Flinders as they are normally closed to bicycles.  The course was a mix of singletrack and fire road with some moderately technical sections and a fair amount of elevation change.  The weather was cool at around 20°C with light rain starting about half way through the race.

As in the previous two races, I was in the C grade.  The C grade raced four laps of the roughly 4.5km course.  This time I decided not to lead from the start, and let someone else set the pace.  This worked out for the first couple of laps where I held a close third or fourth place.  But, by the third lap my fourth place was significantly behind third.  In the end, I finished in fourth with a time of 1:03:08, 30 seconds behind third place, and with fifth and sixth place not far behind.

A brief update on the BB7 brake upgrade:  The BB7s worked very well in the wet and muddy conditions.  My feel for the brakes has improved significantly in the almost three months that I’ve been using them.  I initially had some concerns about rear wheel brake modulation, but the modulation seems on par with the Motolites now that the brakes are fully bedded-in and I’m more used to them.  Also worth noting is that after the initial setup, the brakes haven’t needed any adjustment.  Overall, I am very happy with these brakes.

My official results; hours:minutes:seconds:

For comparison, grade average lap times; minutes:seconds (number of laps completed):

Do you want more data?  Well, I noticed that a large number of people in my race grade were named David.  In fact, 7.8% of people racing at Flinders were named David.  Furthermore, 66% of those named David finished adjacent to another David.  Overall, those named David had a lap average time of 16:29, which is 29 seconds faster than the field average.

Helmet-cam video of my first lap:

On Thursday I entered my first MTB race. This race was the 2009/2010 AMTBC Summer Series ‘Dirt Crit’ No. 1.  A ‘dirt crit’ is similar to a regular road crit or criterium in that the course is very short, but it differs in that the course is mostly dirt, hence ‘dirt crit’.  The race format sets a fixed amount of racing time for each race grade plus one finishing lap after the allotted time has elapsed.

This being my first race, I wasn’t quite sure which class/grade to enter. The grade system for this race was A through E, A being fast/elite and E being something like slow/recreational.  The E grade raced 15 minutes plus one lap, and each successive grade added five minutes; the A grade raced 35 minutes plus one lap.

I entered in the B grade.  My logic was that C must be average, and like everyone else, I think I’m above average.  As I checked in and realized who was racing and what grade they were in, I began to question my self-assigned grade.  But, it occurred to me that the worst that could happen was a last place finish.  And, as luck would have it, that is exactly where I finished.

My official results; minutes:seconds:

For comparison, grade average lap times; minutes:seconds (number of laps completed):

Full results and more info available on the Adelaide MTB Club site: www.amtbc.com.

My average lap time was 2:20, which was only one second slower than the next fastest rider, but I was behind the cutoff and finished one lap down.  Comparing my average lap time to those in the C grade, it looks like I could expect to finsih somewhere in the middle grade.  This being the case, I think I’ll spend some time in the C grade and see how things work out.  But, we will have to wait for the next dirt crit in January to see what happens.

Until then, a photo of a camera Velcro’d to a helmet (if ‘Googled’ is a word, then so is ‘Velcro’d'):

…and a koala from Eagle Park: