Austral wheelrace & training

A couple of weekends ago I competed in the famous Austral Wheelrace, which was held at Vodafone Arena in Melbourne. It was the 107th staging of the event which was first run in 1887. I had three races on the night, no results, didn’t make the wheelrace final, but had a great night’s racing nonetheless. The track is super fast with wide corners and short straights. I rode a big gear (94.5 inch for the anoraks) and hardly felt the pedals all night. The photo shows me warming up in full track mode…disc wheel and all (sorry it's a bit blurry). Sweet!

Am now three weeks out from the Australian Masters champs and training is going well. Last Friday night in training I set a time in full aero mode (disc rear wheel, deep-dish carbon front wheel and aero bars) for the 3km pursuit of 3 min 45 sec, a whole 20 seconds (!!!!!) faster than the first time I posted about 5 weeks ago. I put about 5 seconds of that down to aero position, the rest down to improvement. So the training is paying off, just have to hold it together for another 3 weeks……

Winners are grinners!!

Whoa! After a super hard training block and feeling like cr@p all week, I rocked up to the St Kilda criterium on Sunday not feeling too flash. After a pre-race coffee to get the heart started I reluctantly grabbed a number and lined up for the start. I’ll leave the race description to a quote from the club newsletter….

The B grade field was split very early and a three man break worked like a machine to hold off the bunch with a good 30 sec break for most of the race. A very strong and determined Todd Butterworth made several attempts to cross the gap but to no avail, and he was forced to rejoin the remains of the field. The three escapees were just too strong. Well done to SKCC riders Graeme Coull, Luigi Vecchio and Campbell Elliot who stayed away for the remainder of the race and placed in that order.

So it WAS worth getting out of bed after all.!!