The View from Elsewhere

final bling

On my last day of competition, I won gold again.  This was something of an inglorious win, as there were only five women competing in the mountainbike short course, each in a different age group.  Last time I competed in this event, I was the only woman in my age division, and won gold for finishing last, tho I was up against some truly fearsome women.  This time I came second last, beating only a septuagenarian on a Malvern Star. The track was a lot more technical than the previous short course, and I had to slow right down to my normal speed to complete the first half, switchbacks through some rocky terrain.

But the important thing is that I did it, although the race I'm most pleased with was completing three laps of the mountainbike cross-country course.  It's good just to be a woman competing in this sport, because not many women do. I was talking about this to a fellow female mountainbiker at the airport, about how I knew so many far more co-ordinated and sporty women than me who tried mountainbiking once and said 'never again'.  She said that it was because sporty people were used to everything coming easily to them, and that this was a sport that didn't, in which you had to take some initial knockbacks and be prepared to fall (quite literally).  I think the sports you gravitate towards reflect personality and I do see some parallels between mountainbiking and yoga, which favour strength, persistence, focus and technical skills.  Both of them involve a fair amount of mind over matter (quite literally; plus momentum over matter in mountainbiking). And falling over: you have to do plenty of that in both.

Anyway, 'nuff said; 'nuff skiting. It was a fun week, with many felicitous catch-ups, planned and unplanned.  I felt as though I got the good bits of Centralia without the bad (mainly the isolation).

 

Even writing this now, I miss that country and think there's nothing like it, except in Utah.

This is the end of the Centralian idyll coda. Sporadic blogging will resume elsewhere.

a roll in the mud

Today, which began in the mud of the Pigs' Race, has to end on the high point of a blogpost.

The Pigs' Race, for the uninitiated, involves doing as many laps as possible of a mountainbike short course (3 km) in an hour and rolling a pair of pig dice in between each lap.  A lap scores 10 points; the dice roll scores extra points, depending in what position the pigs fall.  There are a couple of positions in which they can fall that scotch all your points, so you don't want to get greedy and roll for too long.  It can all end in tears.

The other meaning of the race's name came out more clearly this morning: it was to involve a roll in the mud, literally. I have to say, once I saw the mud, I took this race at a more languid pace than I did last year, except when I suddenly tailed some guy speeding down a hill and went splat on my side when I hit the mud at the bottom.  Thereafter, I was always trying to find a way of weaving round a nearby shrub or ducking over a ridge to miss the ever-softening mud-hole. I reckon I was possibly the muddiest person there: the picture left doesn't do justice to the amount of mud on my person and my bike.

  I also procrastinated over the whole dice-rolling business as last year I did more laps than the person who won my age division, but lost out on the pig score.  Some guy tried to give me advice on how to make a quicker 'transition' from bike to dice to bike: I said to him, 'look, it's the Pigs' Race.'

This year, I (ahem) won gold, rather ingloriously as I was competing against a local who raced in a tutu for a laugh.  I did 6 laps in an hour (18 km, with plenty of dillydallying in between), so I was pretty pleased with that (more than about the medal business, as with the other race).  I'll have to try for 7 laps next time. Afterwards, I went round to a friend's place: he's a fireman, so handy with a hose, and he sprayed out several bucketloads of orange sand from my bike's subtle parts.

The desert is all about rain, clouds, mud and daisies at the moment. Oh, and snakes and birds.  At the end of our medal ceremony tomorrow, a flock of budgies flew fittingly over head.  It is without a doubt the coollest weather I've ever experienced in Alice in October. The forecast tomorrow is from 15 to 17 C: I'm used to warmer October weather, like 37 C. A local historian made lofty claims in the paper about the landscape being the closest, (the most verdant I suppose) to what it's been since colonisation...I don't know about that.  There's still a lot of erosion out there.

                                                                            <at the feet of the Masters>

 

squirters, please

Ok, so brief reprisal of this blog while I’m in central Australia for the week…competing in the Masters Games for the fourth time, mountainbiking solely, as my road bike’s in Melbourne.

My first race was this morning, the mountainbike cross-country. In some ways, this is my favourite race, as it passes through some interesting, slightly tricky terrain (narrow winding rocky tracks and stuff) and is more of an endurance event, which I prefer. I figure you can go hard for the first and last kilometres, then slum it in the middle at your own pace.

I felt a little intimidated by the other nine or so competitors. As far as I could tell, I’d moved up into an age division, with some pretty fearsome women in it (contrary to what you might think, women seem to get better at cycling with age—more kms under their belt, maybe). I’d also only done one practice run, and had found that whatever technical skills I had before had gone to pulp. I was starting at the sight of any rocks or trees on or near the track (esp with the overgrowth), foot constantly going to the ground. Things I used to take with ease I had to re-think how to do.

At the start of the race, I loitered up the back of the pack with my friend K, chatting. Talking turned out not to be such a good plan: I missed a significant announcement, that the 40 something women would be riding three rather than two laps of the 7.5 km track.