What a week! The Port to Port MTB race was four days of early starts, solid training and deep-end learning as we were thrust into technical and steep mountain bike trails. The unexpected rock-bed or extended tree-roots as you ride around a 180 bend can easily throw you off course or off your bike! We all discovered that it is amazing what an MTB can ride up or down and improved our skills very significantly across the four days. The single track trails are seen as the cream by most MTB riders, and the race included many single track segments. They can be very beautiful, one of our favourites being the AWABA rain forest trails where the trails almost went dark as the ferns encroached us!
We’ve all had our thrills and spills, it was a brilliant event shared with a great bunch of guys with team work and camaraderie. Our results: Shaun and I had to accept our performance within the ARC sub-comp while John finished 12th on GC within his age-group, a fantastic result John! Shaun won stage honours on stage 4 (photo below) while Phil won overall GC.
One of our regular debates was the equivalent distance on a MTB versus a road bike. Shaun’s position (designed to suit his performance on day 1 I think) was that MTB is very tough and 45km on an MTB is equivalent to 300km in the alps while John and I took an equivalent-time approach, 3.5 hours on an MTB to ride 45km is similar to 75km on a hilly road ride.
A big thanks to John for transporting us all around in a dual-cab ute with our trendy MTB arrangement (as seen in the previous post) and taking the bikes to the carwash for a clean up after riding along the beach! A big thanks also to Shaun for selecting excellent accomodation, central to all ride and next to the finish on day 4.
A great example of how ARC can bring together riders to go and have adventures … race, tour, charity, challenges .. it doesn’t matter …. just do it .
Thanks for sharing the experience
Might need to get an MTB!!
Congrats guys – great effort to just survive!
Great story and pics – thanks for posting. Sounds like a lot of fun, and commradery.
Thanks for the write up. well done, looks like it was a great event
What one of my family friend says about MTB distance is double what distance you did to compare it to the road. Also might need to organise some ARC MTB rides soon.