Mountain Hardwear Open5 North Wales
Ten Jelly Babies is all it Takes … A Winners Secrets Revealed
John Houlihan (Santa Cruz) / 12.04.2010
The run map made dizzy reading, until you realized the contours were at 5m intervals; life wasn't so bad after all.
Competitors got a good warm up because it was a 30 minute ride from the event centre to the Start/Transition/Finish area. This caught out quite a few people because competitors were still arriving with 4 minutes left of the start window. The ride was worth it because it put you in the heart of the very compact competition area.
This was the last event of the Mountain Hardware Series and I was lying second overall to Andy Conn by 1.2%. However I was 24 points ahead of Andy in the Total Points Competition for £500 worth of Mountain Hardware kit, so playing safe wasn't an option for either of us.
From the start I messed up the sequence for my first 4 controls. I was distracted by thoughts of the bigger plan, riding and assessing my options globally but messing up locally. I took 20, 8, 12, 5 and 4 which was very inefficient and meeting Andy Conn at 8 was a surprise for both of us. We bumped into each other dibbing and Andy fell over onto a rider on the floor fixing a puncture! I manhandled him onto his feet and we were off again in different directions. Andy took the first 4 in the best order of 20, 12, 8, 5, and 4 leaving me 12 minutes behind him by control 5.
Any area with steep terrain usually has a limited network of ridable tracks. But this course was designed with plenty of options and some nice control sequences taking riders onto great tracks. Short cut and slightly shorter loop choices made the good course design appeal to all without the need for multiple in/out controls that seem to ruin the flow of a ride. Simon Enderby’s ( For Goodness Shakes) ride from 13 to 12 was good use of height gain and crossing point. Kim Collinson and Neil Hamblin (Team Inov 8) neatly went 3 to 5 because they took in 7.
As usual the harder to get controls attracted the fewest points. Riders wanting to clear the MTB needed to be bold and commit to controls 2 and 3, requiring pace to execute with no short cuts out and giving fewer points per kilometre. Failure would give a post race analysis of "I could have have got more points doing less riding".
Andy Conn and I made the same choice, to clear up or at least try to, we could not afford to miss any controls this early in the event. Starting 5 minutes apart, I still had 12 minutes to catch up from the split times, but while riding I calculated 10 minutes.
Time to get my head down and execute the navigation without error. A perfect ride apart from a silly error turning into the wrong road from 16 to 14 lost me about 90 seconds.
In a clock wise loop, controls 16, 14, 19, 18 27 seemed to flow. However this series of controls seemed very popular among riders going anti clockwise as 17, 16, 18, 19, 14. Maybe local knowledge played a part but I still can't see it that way and would ride 27, 18, 16, 19, 14 going anti clockwise.
The climb to 18 from 19 was arduous with time beginning to press, a strong head wind, some snow patches and very slippery ground. Just what I didn't need. 18 to 25 was boggy and good technical riding skills were required if the pace wasn't to drop; a good sting in tail just when you thought you had it cracked. Control 25 to transition was a fast blast, but I really do need to get new forks, TFT Tuned refused to service them since they were beyond economical repair 2 years ago!
Andy Conn cleared the MTB in 3:05:03 and was running out of transition when I punched in at 3:05:15, I was 12 seconds behind now!
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