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Wow, that was a big week. North east hills twice, out to the Youies, and a few hours on the Yarra Trails thrown in for good measure. Riding the new Kurrajong section at the Youies was awesome fun, especially the long flowing link track between the sections.

How’s that for a view.

Simon riding the rollercoaster boardwalk at the end of the link track. Great fun until a gust of wind blows you off the side. No kidding.

The problem with riding Yarra Trails on a Saturday afternoon is that everyone else is too. We stopped four times for a bit of a chat with different people, and Alex joined us with his rather shiny looking Yeti hardtail for a while too.

So that was my week. 5800 meters of climbing all up - take that you beach road specialists!

Geelong MTB club always puts on great events, so I’d been looking forward to this race for a while. Details were hard to come by, and on the day it was revealed it would be a 2km TT, 3 lap XC Race, and a 15min + 1 lap crit/STXC. They had proper electronic timing for the TT too, with the clock started by the rider moving knocking aside the bar, and a mat for the finish. I’ll come back to that later.

I’d like to set the record straight at this point: I have not broken a(nother) frame. I was racing on Simon’s Scott thanks to a little excitement with a stick, my derailleur, and the fatties ride. For extra fun I went 1×9 with a 32T ring.

The hardtail turned out to be a good choice for the TT, which went straight up a fireroad then down one of the less technical descents. I powered up locked out passing two riders, then flowed down the hill… and came to the long finishing straight. 140rpm cadence and this 1×9 thing doesn’t seem like such a good idea any more. Especially when the results (remember that fancy timing system?) came in, with me second place 0.28 seconds behind James Maebus. Alex Randall was only 2.5 seconds further back.

With such close racing in the TT, the race looked to be a cracker, and didn’t disappoint. Jimmy decided to be anti-social and ride off the front halfway through the first lap, but Chris Soanes joined me and Alex in a ding dong battle for the placings. First Alex broke away on the descent, only to be slowly reeled back in. I selfishly got Chris to do finishing closing the gap, and just as we caught up at the base of the big climb I went around and attacked, dropping Chris. I went again near the top of the, but wasn’t able to put more than a few seconds into Alex who promptly overtook me as I spun out over the crest. He broke away again on the descent, and I let him go to save myself for the crit. I sure missed the dually going down Cressy climb too.

With the lesson learnt from the first two races, I swapped my middle ring for a big ring to tackle the flattish crit course. We went down the main straight with a tailwind, before taking singletrack back up the slight slope, then onto the straight again. The course took around 90 seconds at race pace. I found myself in front off the start, until Jimmy decided he wanted the lead and moved past me. Chris jumped in front for a lap, and then Alex wanted a go. Jimmy did some more work before eventually Alex told me to have a go, so with 8 gone and 3 to go I jumped in front. With two to go I looked around but no one wanted it, so I went around again. With one to go I figured they’d had their chance, so I gunned it and stayed in front. I kept winding it up, waiting for an orange or blue figure to appear beside me. But somehow they didn’t appear, and I smashed myself silly down the home straight to take the win. It’s some feeling winning in a sprint with a heap of people standing around watching. I even gave a victory salute, which turned bad when I hit a rut and almost came off. Whoopsies :-).

Fox, fox, fox (mushroom mushroom!)

All up it was a really fun day, GMBC did a great job of putting on something a bit different. I hope the concept takes off and we see more stage races, and more different format (STXC, TT, etc) races too.

Okay, so I’m back from Cairns and it appears the ‘away’ message that was supposed to go out to anyone that emailled me, well, didn’t.  It did however email myself over and over and over again, leaving my email well and truely as we say here, ‘rooted’.

So, if you sent an email to me in the last six days, please send it on again and I will reply to it in hopefully a more technologically adept manner.

The second round of the Anaconda Enduro Series was held among the mist at Lysterfield Park on the weekend, where all the lycra clad participants froze their butts off for the first few hours of the day.

With quite a few line up changes and some additional teams in the pro pairs category, it made for an action packed day of racing.

Team Yeti Cycles made their debut in the Anaconda Series sporting a new “prototype” yeti ridden by fast guy Ben Randall. The paint was a bit different from what we’re all used to seeing and the decals were a little primitive with a what looked like a hand written down tube decal, but that didn’t slow the boys down ridding themselves into 3rd place.

The team giant lineup remained the same with Murray Spink and John Claxton smashing out 10 laps and finsihing up in 2nd place. John clearly had to get back and moe the lawn as he left halfway though the race leaving Murray to finish what he had started. Murray did well to regain second, but was unable to reel in the Torq team who were tearing up the course from start to finish.

The big line change was with team Torq, bringing in hired gun James Maebus which was a surprise to us all (well at least me), which made the team un-beatable on the day, finsihing in the top spot with 11 laps of the 13km course.

Also worth a mention is Adrian Jackson, fresh off his win of the NT stage race, who absolutely smashed the field not only in the solo category, but just in general, finishing in 4th place overall. AJ your a freak!

Ah, weekends like these. Out on Friday night for dinner and a few too many beers with workmates, then 6 hours sleep before heading up to Kinglake with Brett and Sime. Four hours of hills is more than I’ve ridden in a while, so by the end I was feeling just a little tired. Injuries… just can’t recommend them.

Mmm… yummy!

I don’t want to know what’s going on there.

Sunday and it was Brett’s turn to turn up a little hung over for our trip to Lysterfield. Aside from the recent Anaconda Enduro series round it’s a while since we were out there, and the changes to the start of Blair Witch were a bit of a disappointment, bye bye one of my favorite sections. Riding Buckle down towards the lake was great though, and enough to send us out for the third lap. Of everything bar the games course anyway. No stacks all round, and a dab free run through the (now rather easier) rockgarden, and a good day all up. Finished off by returning a lost phone to another rider and a surprisingly edible pizza on Heatherton Rd near the Hallam Nth Rd roundabout.

Later in the evening we headed over to DISC to watch someone ride a rather strange wheeled device around a velodrome for 12 hours. To my eyes that’s the worst of track racing and 24hr racing combined. I can picture the briefing: “So what you’ve got to do right, is just turn left. All night.” We only stayed for an hour, but apparently he covered 500km in total. Crazy.

Sat: 115.2km out, 1235m up, 4:06 on.
Sun: 54.49km out, 1051m up, 2:59 on.

Another weekend, another race. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after two months off, but it’s certainly keeping me out of trouble.

The first round of the Anaconda Enduro series used a course heavy in fireroad, with almost all the climbing contained in the middle 50% of the course. The result of this was pain and lots of it. Climb slowly through singletrack, short rest, left into the headwind on a long rising fireroad, right and more climbing, left into singletrack and you’re still going up. Brief fun singletrack respite before a sweeping right hander and you’re at the base of the ‘Here is a cliff. Would you like to ride up it?’ A-line climb. Get to the top of that with legs on fire and heart beating it’s way out of your chest, your reward is another super fast road descent, with a sharp corner at the bottom cruelly stealing all your speed. Down over the bars in a timetrial position as the road continues flat for a while, then begins to climb… and climb. Into the singletrack, up and up all the way to the rock garden.

I’m, still going uphill?

All this is especially fun when you realise about halfway through it that your water bottle has ejected itself and you’re not getting a drink. All that aside though I had great fun, there is some great flowy singletrack out there. With a bit of luck they’ll throw blair witch into the next round too, that track is serious enjoyment.

It is possible we take this racing thing a bit too seriously sometimes.

The lack of progress results due to a computer glitch left us a little confused as to our position during the day. At the business end with one lap to go I got around to timing the gaps, and saw Rob Eva head out for Felt Racing 2’s final lap with a 3 minute gap on us. I set about attempting to catch him and pull us into third place, but it turned out to be too big of an ask. My finish time left us 72 seconds adrift. Next time maybe…

Problem: competition riding too fast.
Solution: Deflate tyres.

Stats: 4th, 61.4km out, 1427m up, 2:38 on.

You know, normally the life of the bicycle designer is fairly glamourous. One weekend you’re sketching ideas for bike gloves by donning latex gloves and scribbling on them, and the next you’re watching your hands slowly go black Scotchbriting a Titanium frame for hours on end. Or you could be trying to fit a guy who barely fits on a 29er on something that would make a Penny Farthing blush. Or doing a Mixte.

I can’t say I ever dreamed of doing a Mixte frame when I stared Thylacine. Titanium? Sure. Suspension? Bring it on. Mixte? WTF is a Mixte? I didn’t even know what a Mixte was, but I have to say, after doing our first chick’s bike (Yes I know Mixtes were originally unisex bikes) I really, really dig it. It took more brain power than your average 29er hardtail and that was a great thing, because there’s only so many ’standard’ custom frames you can do before you wish someone would ask you to don latex gloves and design some gloves.

So here she is, our first Mixte! Ain’t she sweet?

After building her up with Evan from Cyclic (My new fave LBS. It has beer.) I actually rode it back to the studio, and I gotta say even though it is ridiculously small for me (as in, I’m almost a foot taller than the customer) it was hard to get the grin off my face as I tootled down the road.

From the great SRAM 3-speed internal hub, funky ‘three string guitar’ cable routing and luscious House of Kolor candy paint, this bike is a bagload of fun and I’m looking forward to handing it over to the customer this Sunday.

Check out the pix.

That’s a photo of me on ‘little cat’, as my current ride is known around Thylacine HQ, descending boulder track with the propedal off and a big grin on the dial. This is somewhat of a Big Thing, as generally my race face looks more like this:

It really is that fun, and it goes downhill faster than the US economy too. Unfortunately I wasn’t going up the hills so fast, which combined with a few mechanicals relegated us to 5th. I had way to much fun on the great tracks out at the You Yangs to really worry about that though.

Recently we’ve been playing around with the configuration of our Arete model.  Until recently, both Arete and Arete SL have been very much a machine for the racing fool, with a high degree of emphasis on being lightweight.

For the latter part of this year, we’ve decided to change it up and make the Arete slightly more robust and towards the ‘All Mountain’ side of the spectrum.  That means 100mm forks, stronger and larger tubing, and dedicated seat and chainstays.  The seat tube is now 31.8mm and incorporates a 29.4 Thomson seatpost, which is now (from 7 May onward) included with the frame.  The frame is designed to be as compact as possible for easy flickability and low centre of gravity.

Unlike the attached example, the new Arete will have single bend chainstays and a monostay seatstay arangement.  Clean, simple, tough and ‘old skool’.  Paint if you’re wondering is our 08 ‘Team’ orange ‘Arancio Borealis’, which also happens to be the same paint as you’d find on a Lamborghini Gallardo.

The Arete SL will now be a complete Columbus Zona tubed unit available in any wheelsize, and the Ether will be our new top end steel offering available in 26″ only.  Yeah I know, we should update our website one of these days.

That’s right, I’m baaaack. Well, kinda. The riding fast part seems to be eluding me so far, but who needs to go fast right?

I got a special greeting for my first race back: a forecast of hail, showers and 15 degrees. I ventured out of the car fully kitted out in my riding warmies. Rego was a breeze and it was out onto the reversed course to see what we were in for. The rain had been soaked up pretty well, and the damp track was gripping very nicely. There was plenty of tech climbs and descents, with some flowing singletrack sections thrown in too. There was logs a plenty to jump, and a rock garden to navigate - which I did without breaking anything! With 200 meters of climbing per 6.5km lap it wasn’t a super hilly course, with much of the difficulty coming from short steep sections. Mainly though, the course was lots of fun. Especially after a few laps when you were used to it, it was easy to have a ball out there.

The race went well for me until the forth lap, when I collected a stick overtaking through the scrub, and somehow turned my derailleur upside down. After staring at in in bewilderment for 20 seconds I grabbed it and gave it a good shove to rotate it back into place. Unfortunately after this my gears began skipping, despite another stop to check hanger alignment. Not not after this I began to feel light headed and realised I probably hadn’t eaten enough. I ate two gus during the fifth lap and during the sixth things began to come good again. The stops and skipping gears had taken away my intensity however, and I couldn’t help just rolling around at a lower pace. I crossed the line happy to have stayed on all race and not blown up. Now to find those climbing legs again…