Races are cancelled due to too much rain

the National DH race round 3 in Rotorua and N-Duro summer cup round 2 both scheduled to be on 23 Jan 2011 are cancelled!

... bugger! i have had this happen just once before, so i guess i am pretty lucky that it hasn't been more often. last time it was in Christchurch though so that was a bit more of a bumner as i had travelled all the way down there and was all amped to do the race (crater rim), but it rained ALL night and wouldn't stop raining (just like now!) and in the end the race was cancelled! we ended up watching dvds all day instead of being outside going hard on the bikes.

i understand why the race is cancelled and i do in some way think it's a good call, event though at the same time i really wanted to race today, i am sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
oh well, we will just have focus on the next race and go twice as hard there ;)

N-duro summer cup 2011, race 1

it feels really good to have the first race for the year out of the way and even better since i managed to stick to my plan and finish well.

it was great to get up this morning and find that the temperatures weren't as hot as they had been, it can get really hot on some of those climbs in the forest so i was prepared for some testing temperatures, but fortunately it never got quite that hot as a nice breeze kept us all a bit cooler.

the race field wasn't quite that big today, which i guess was because quite a few riders were at the first cross country race of this years national series which was in Tauranga. nevertheless there was a good number of riders who lined up on the start line eager to test their form. Dirk Peters took the lead right from the start and kept pushing his way further and further ahead of the rest of the riders who had no chance to keep his wheel, he finished with a huge gap to the next rider, awesome job!

i tried to push it from the start to try and get away from the other girls and stay away from too much trail congestion. from there the goal was to get a good lead, this is hard to judge though as you don't get to see the other riders unless they are right behind you so you can never tell how big the lead really is. i was feeling pretty good and was recovering well throughout the race, so it wasn't that hard to keep pushing ahead. i hadn't been doing that much riding over the last few weeks and was therefore a little unsure how the body was going to cope, so it was a nice surprise to find my form was ok.

thanks heaps to all those riders who i had little battles with along the way, it made it a great race :)

i am looking forward to the next race in two weeks.

holidays are nice :)

i hope you had as much fun over the christmas and new years time as we did. i thought i would post some images from a couple of walks we did. the first three are from Rainbow mountain and the rest from the Tongariro crossing.