No way in hell 2012
Hay guys,
A few weeks ago I decided to have a crack at something different, I enterd into the no way in hell extreme enduro.
I hadn’t done anything like this before so I had no idea what to expect, we camped on site and arrived Friday evening in time to watch a round of the new Zealand enduro series on Saturday which me and Georgina both really enjoyed watching.
Sunday was the prologue to decide the starting order of the main event on Monday, it was a short lap with a few tight technical bits in it and a few river crossings. It was my first experience of riding a trials bike full noise for half an hour straight, a lot of fun but also a completely different type of fitness to the normal stop and start trials Routine. I actually manage to win this part of the event much to my surprise, I had know idea that most of the riders I was passing I was laping.
So after winning Sundays prologue this meant I was the first rider away on the first loop of approx 30km, the lap was well marked with arrows however it wasn’t long before a couple of the enduro boys caught up on the open farm land hills, I couldn’t match the two guys in front on the first lap as it was really open and the trials bike was at a real disadvantage, however after a short break and a fuel stop soon into the second lap things started to toughen up, this is where the trials bike came out to play and I was able to gain some time on the bigger bikes. I came in right behind the leader of the event Mitchell Nield and we set off together on the last lap knowing that the laps were getting progressively harder and that this one was going to be the hardest, I stuck with Mitchell for the first 15 mins or so before he pulled away on the open terrain, about an hour into the lap I arrived to amassive down hill that made any trials section here in nz look like a walk in the park, I it was so step in one part I just had to let the bike go and hope it stopped at the tree I was aiming it for, after about a 30 minute decent I still had about 20 minutes to go to the finish, near the finish I coaught up to Mitchell on a steep down hill on loose gravel and was right on his wheel however once at the bottom the course opened right up along a river and the trials bike was no match for the gas gas 300 enduro bike. I finished my first ever extreme enduro in second place covered in mud and very sore and tired but I had a lot of fun along the way and look forward to another event like this.
Jake