A TASTE OF PORT
Day One
I specialise in backwards climbing. No, I don’t climb on the bike backwards and pedal up hills looking where I’ve been.
What I mean is I tend to drop like a stone through the pack at the start of a race that immediately goes uphill.
It’s a bit disheartening when we’re talking a few hundred metre and a few riders coming by. But when the first 15km of a race is virtually all uphill, as was the opening stage of the Port to Port at Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley, then there’s just no denying reality. All I do is try not to beat myself up too much mentally for being so below average … and lock on to the wheel of someone else who is having an equally tough time. Hey, it’s good training even if it is a race, and eventually it does end. In this case after with a left turn into the bush and the start of the singletrack.
Now I’d been looking forward to this. The course profile looked relatively benign and I wanted to sample some of that great Hunter Valley singletrack I’d been reading about. Obviously, that was elsewhere. This stuff was moto trail, yo-yoing up and down the side of the hill; sharp right up, sharp left down. With the sandy soil offering little grip, long lines of riders shuffled up steep
