Finally a race in my home town. This race was held on a Friday and Saturday. On the Thursday I went up and did a track walk then gave the guys a hand taping the track. Saw a couple of different lines that I had missed during the track walk that I saw while taping the track. What was supposed to be a 30min track walk turned into a 4 hour taping session.
Saturday morning we headed into Long Gully for practice day. Got there a bit later then I planned due to having a pick up a truck for shuttles. First couple of runs I semi cruised down and kept missing a couple of the lines that I wanted to do. I did a run following one of my mates and stayed on his tail and he ended up riding the line I kept missing so I ended up getting it managed to remember where it was for the rest of the day. The track wasn’t really a technical track of such. It was more about pedalling and letting go of the brakes. So throughout the day I just tried to let go of the brakes more and leave the braking till the end. Had a few sketchy moments but managed to hold it all together for the most of it. Practice was good and I was happy with how I was riding. While I was having a break in the monster tent Mildy came over and told me that 3 news would be here tomorrow and that they wanted to speak to interview me on Saturday and that they would ring me later today. After dinner they rang me we spoke for a bit and then said that I would see them tomorrow.
Sunday rolled around and the weather didn’t look too good from my house. Dark clouds over the area where I knew Long Gully was. The closer I drove to the track the darker it got. Thankfully it didn’t turn to anything and the weather just did the typical Wellington thing of being nice and windy. The 3 news people turned up a little bit before the seeding runs were starting. I talked to them off camera and got a lot of practice of putting my helmet on as they wanted to keep filming that for some reason. When it was time to go up for my seeding run, one of the ladies came up with and took some footage of peoples seeding runs and put a helmet cam on my bars looking at me (this footage wasn’t used). My seeding run went good. Hit everything how I wanted, didn’t make any mistakes and seeded first. Between my seeding and race run I got interview by the TV 3 News people and once that was done I headed up for my race run. My race run went alright. I pedalled more than I did in seeding but slipped a pedal a few times and make a few mistakes. Race run felt faster but because of all the little mistakes here and there it was only .01 or a second quicker than seeding. I took the win again though. And my TV 3 News interview was on the news that night.
TV 3 News link: http://www.3news.co.nz/Big-dreams-for-mountain-biker/tabid/415/articleID/243333/Default.aspx (click view video)
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