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.

bitten

Yesterday, I was most heinously bitten by a dog on the thigh while I was riding on a mountainbike path (n.b.: not a footpath or a bushwalking track).  It was some kind of whitish terrier thing, which first mouthed my feet on the pedals then leapt up and started biting me on the outer thigh.

I yelled at the girl who was walking the dog and another off the leash, asking her to curb and discipline her dog.  I felt a bit guilty about this, as I would love nothing more than to have a little dog running alongside me while I'm biking through the bush.  But it seems there's always some namby-pamby hippy chick tripping along the mountainbike trail with a semi-civilised dingo-cross, rescued from a remote community, singing out, 'Don't worry, he won't hurt you!'  I mean, don't people know the limits of their animals' personalities, their likely behaviour, and discipline accordingly? 

This woman was apologetic enough.  Other people have argued back and told me off for inciting their dog...one even refused to put the dog back on its leash after it had bitten me.  I've only actually ever been bitten by whitefella housedogs.   I've been chased and mouthed by camp dogs, but never bitten by one...However, I wouldn't put it past them: three people/corpses have been mauled by camp dogs here over the past couple of years.

I have been moved almost by this incident to put pen to paper and write to the Advocate, complaining about the romanticisation of the canine in central Australia.  All this could be a diversion from the writing I'm meant to be doing this weekend. Or the housework, come to think of it.

I tried to photograph my leg last night, but was unable to get quite the focus, the drama, the bruising, the puncture marks (the outer thigh's a bit difficult).  It just looks like a lump of meat, adorned with a few pin pricks:

 

None of my wounds (usually from bike stacks) have photographed that well. More happily, here's Lulu, trying to shoot the breeze.   

Now that the weather has cooled (i.e. to 36 C), the cats have joined me downstairs where it's cooler, whereas they preferred to be upstairs where it's stinking hot on 40 + C days.

There's been a lot of indignant purring and yowling.  I think they really do hold me responsible for the weather.

back in the dirt

Remember this?

These dust-burnished legs are a result of the Enduro, otherwise known as the 'Day in the Dirt', a yearly event that takes place here in September which involves people, either singly or in teams, seeing how many doing laps they can do of a treacherous mountainbike track in 12 hours.  It's all totally mad (even I think it's mad), esp given the heat, the length of the track (my best time was a bit over an hour) and the time period.

I had no intention of ever participating in the Enduro ever again, but then Sebastiene told me I was on her team, so I acquiesced, flattered of course to be invited into the company of Cool People, not to mention Cool Cyclists (i.e. ones a lot faster than me).  Our team also included G (no nickname for him yet, but he has the same name as ATSIC's most notorious chair) and Jez, a non-mountainbiker, who was prevailed upon to cycle with us at the last moment, and subsequently rode faster than anyone else (exc maybe G on some laps), despite no training, no experience of mountainbiking, never having done the track before, etc.  Humiliating!

<the start of the track>

At first I thought I'd be way too stressed to ride in the Enduro (on top of everything else), but then I decided that it would give me A Focus apart from work.  However, my good intentions of training fell in a heap, as all I had time to do during the week was to swim 1 km on my way home.  I rode the track twice in preparation (and apparently I missed one section the first time round).

This year's track was a new one: longer and more technical than the old one, (winding past many fine whitegoods, which I must go back and photograph some day).  The only way to get through it, as far as I was concerned, was to plug in the IPod: it not only gave me a rhythm for my cadence (ha! what cadence?) but it helped block the heat, the other riders, and the sheer onerousness of endurance.    Occasionally another rider would be right up behind me before I heard them -- I often thought they were part of the sound effects on the track I was listening to at the time, but music was the way to go.  It was a very hot day: about 33 C round 2-3 pm.  Today's even hotter: we're heading up towards 35 C.  In fact it's going to be a 30-something week.  We each did three laps tho Jez did only two: he piked after lunch.  By 6.30 pm, we'd done eleven laps and decided to call it a day as none of us had high-beam lights (it went from 8.30 to 8.30).  My friend the vet did seven laps on her own till her team-mate finished at work and relieved her in the afternoon.  It was an odd kind of day: too hot to be social, really.  We sat under tents, ate and drank a lot, lusted after better bikes, that kind of thing.

<a serious bikers' pavillion>

cattlewater

On Saturday, I sallied forth at 5.45 am to meet my companions for the Cattlewater Classic. (Yes, this is what you think: another  boring bike post.  I tell my students that it's how you tell the story that makes it interesting, not necesarily it's about; however, that may not hold true for cycling).  Fortunately, the meeting place was less than a kilometre from my front door, tho it somehow took us fifteen minutes to get there.   The pre-dawn rise didn't actually kill me. I think my biggest problem with pre-dawn rises is insomnia: I'm not someone who's assured of sleeping like a log as soon as my head hits the pillow, so I can't fall asleep at 9 pm and rise at 5 am, fully refreshed and all that.  As it was, most of my compatriots seemed to spend the night before writing lists and packing things on the lists till the wee hours.

The Cattlewater Classic is wholly new event, a two-day mountainbike race (that's right) devised by some local cycling luminaries.  It takes its name from a narrow rocky road -- the Cattlewater Pass track -- which I had to ride along at the end of the first day, somewhere in the wilds of the Arltunga historical reserve.  I can't remember the overall kilometre-age, but it was something like 170 km on the first day and 180 km on the second, including 220 km offroad.  The route took us out along the eastern road through the old Arltunga goldfields, then up to the Plenty highway, along the Pinnacles track and Garden road and onto the northern highway, then back into town.  It's quite a beautiful and historical area, which was a minor hive of activity during the goldrush days.  It's still possible to go fossicking and find zircon, mica and other gems (tho not if you're in a bike race).

My team consisted of four women, all of whom are seen as fairly ho-hum cyclists with one exception (not moi), plus someone's father driving our support vehicle. We were named 'Bindi's Bitches', not by moi: in fact, I took to calling the team 'the entourage of Steve Irwin's daughter.'  It was later explained to me that the name came from an associate of the team, whose nickname is 'Bindi'.  The idea was that we would all do one leg of the ride each day in order to have some hope of finishing before dusk. I was invited to join because of my technical skills, these supposedly being the ability to negotiate sandy and rocky terrain on a mountainbike.  I had to ride the most difficult terrain at the end of the first day and the beginning of the second (and no, I didn't fall off).

in the early morning, as we set off down the Eastern road, there were a lot of vapour trails about, which made things quite picturesque: my theory about these was that Americans had been doing military manoeuvres in planes that morning (yes, blame everything on the Americans).  N, the first member of our team, was given a ten minute head start -- the rationale being that it wouldn't be a good idea for us to fall too far behind during the day.  As it was, none of the others caught her in this 73 km dash. 

<the rest of our team>

<N wondering if she can really have come that far aleady>

latte lover in the wilderness

The weekend was taken up with the Cattlewater pass cycling business.  This is me drinking from the silver service outside Arltunga pub in the heartland of the old gold rush area here.  It's about ten in the morning, probably about ten degrees: I'm wearing two layers of lycra and something strange is going on with my sunglasses.

I am now officially exhausted -- so much so that I think I'll go to Pilates rather than Spin tonight.  More later. Another boring bike post looming...

triffecta

On the long weekend (there are many long weekends in the Northern Territory for some reason; I think this was a belated celebration of May Day), I rode just under 500 km from Alice to Watarrka/Kings Canyon with the bike club. I have done so for the past two years: this was my triffecta.  This annual ride has some claim to fame like 'the only 500km bike ride in the world that doesn't pass through any towns' ('Jim's Place' and Erldunda mustn't qualify as towns).

I've blogged about this one in the past -- twice in fact, so I wasn't going to do it all over again.  I was just going to post a 'photo essay', but then I thought the pictures might need some explanation.  So, on the first day we rode 200km to Erldunda, the second -- 160 km to a campsite on the Lasseter Highway, then 130 km on Monday to Kings Canyon Resort.  The first day, despite being the longest, was probably also the easiest, as the winds were behind us most of the way.  I began with a hangover and three and a half hours sleep, despite my sternest warnings the day before to self not to do so (but there was a fortieth the night before).  I spent a lot of my time trying to rehydrate and conserve energy. In general, it was harder than the previous year, when I had enough energy to compete in sprints and the like. The winds became more of an issue when we turned onto the Lasseter Highway. The last day we battled with the heat, winds and hills -- er, 'gradual inclines', to get to the Canyon. It was also unseasonably hot: I don't know how hot but I suspect early to mid 30s in the middle of the day.  At night, I slept with only a sheet on top.  We endured many flies during the day, mites and drop-bug caterpillars in the night.

There were fifty cyclists and nineteen 'support crew' (sometimes this just meant partners) in all.  Some of the pictures below make this look like rather a shambling effort.  I assure you we rode in a splendid pelaton most of the way, shepherded by vehicles that stopped every couple of hours to ply us with complex carbohydrates.  There were many heroic feats conducted with adjustable spanners, Allen Keys, bike cleats and so forth, esp by Sebastiene in her 80s-poster-'girls can do aything' mode.  In some respects, it was probably all rather easier than it sounds, because of the big group support factor.  I'm more worried about the fact that I have to ride 90 km off-road for a team event in two weekends' time.  Still, driving back home yesterday, it was hard to believe we'd ridden along the same road only a couple of days' ago.

que?

more of this whitegoods in the wilderness business

hubbard's end

So I'm back after getting up at 3 am in Auckland (11.30 pm Alice time) to catch the shuttle bus to the airport yesterday in order to make the connecting flight from Sydney to Alice.  There is only one flight a day to central Australia from the eastern seaboard cities, and usually it's an early flight.  I arrived home at 12.30 pm, having spent over twelve hours in travel (six and a half of those being on planes).  One of the first things I noticed when I got off the plane was how quickly I became encrusted with flies.  The other was the fine film of orange dirt over things at home -- difficult to escape in central Australia, even when you're not there to track dirt in, as it comes through the air-conditioning vents.

Distance has an amazing way of marking an immediate line between holiday-land and one's daily grind. The seven-day Northland circuit now seems a world away. Right now I'm thinking about revising my teaching notes for next week -- mind you, only thinking, having spent my morning embroiled in the mental spaghetti of administrivia.  One of the good things about cycling is that physical exhaustion tends to curtail any mental hyperactivity such as worrying uselessly about work or writing projects. But I'm still tired and hugely hungry, unable to get out of the habit of 'carb-loading' -- that is, of eating carbs every one or two hours, now that I've started it.

I do feel a tad regretful about not being able to continue riding: I think it would be great to spend 6--8 weeks cycling round NZ.  I felt sorry not to have done the last leg from Paihia to Whangerei when I travelled through that country on the bus.  It looked quite beautiful, tho I would also have regretted not having the opportunity to play tourist at Paihia.  In retrospect, having a day of rest every week on a cycling tour seems like a good idea.  An average of 70 km a day also seems like a little too much.  One of the hostellers told me about a little old lady who'd stayed at their BBH and who aimed to cycle 50-60 km a day, which sounds like a great way to spend your retirement.  I found the first 10 km and the last 10 km were the hardest every day (not that doing less would make a difference to this).  The first 10 km because your muscles are just warming up (always a big mistake to jump on the bike first thing in the morning without having walked around for a while) and because of the mental challenge of having to ride all that way. The last 10 km because you've ridden all that way and surely it can't be that much further.  Most of the places I stayed were also on the coast, which often meant riding into headwinds on the last lap.  Some of the headwinds were so strong I swear the bike would have come to a stop going down hill if I hadn't kept on pedalling.

But did I feel the liberation of the road?  Yes, though more downhill than uphill, and only if there weren't any headwinds present.

N.B. I've uploaded my photos at Flickr, as it's much faster than Typepad.  They are arranged under batches titled Auckland and the Northland Circuit.