Waroona Pain

Craig's Diary from Waroona ride!
Hills...long ones...steep ones...ski-ramp-shaped ones...take your pick...Waroona had them all.

Left Narrogin with Paul at 6.30am and met Trev and Tom in Waroona about 9.00. No sign of Pottsie so we thought we'd whack on our bright pink tops (mine was more of a boob tube) so at least he could see us.

Finally spotted him driving to into the event with 15min to spare but only to find out that he'd withdrawn with a sore foot (heart) muscle. Pottsie had driven in on the course and when he didn't get out of first gear on those hills, he was quite thankful he'd forgotten to pack his bike.

Team Zin-Zan made a good start despite some heckling from the gals behind us who wanted to swap tops. A lazy 10km hill to start with but went well. We were thinking all was well when we cleared it but then it was another hill, then another and another....Trefort's (speed bump) hill would have been nice. The group worked well together with Paul, Tom and myself rotating through the front and Trev soldiered on in third spot.

I don't remember a single flat piece of road...I remember that because I was looking for somewhere to vomit (not so slow uphill that it would land on my handle bars and not so fast downhill that Trev would cop it). I think we averaged around 29kph over the 80km which came about by doing about 5kph up hills and 75kph downhills.

We saw all sorts in a big field. Lots of very nice bikes. Really well run and lots of....well uhmm...fun.

The highlight was our dash for the finish down that 10km hill that we encountered on the way out. We got taken over by the "green team" about 20km out and we let them go (there was about 10 of them). At about 15km out we saw they were in trouble with 3 riders pushing the one guy up the last hill. Trev was still with us so we pounced. What a ride...did the last 10km downhill at about 72kph in a big pack of pink and green. Lots of jostling for positions and really scary. Despite the vertical drop we still had to pedal really hard and we all were spent. The green team pulled away at the very end but I'm pretty sure some of them may have still been behind us - but their sprinter, who was wearing the tag, beat us to the line. We caught up with them after the race to find they enjoyed the mad dash as much as we did. I took the opportunity and asked them if any of them had seen my knee cap but to no avail - I think it landed in a cow paddock.

Check out photos and times for this ride on the website