Bike Buller

For those who don’t know, I am a keen mountain biker, and have recently started attending some organised races. Although, I technically can’t claim to be a serious racer, for me it’s more about the experience and the atmosphere at a race meet. Last weekend, I attended the Mt Buller Mountain Bike Festival at Mt Buller, Victoria. This is all part of our training towards the BMC 100km. It was an enourmously enjoyable event, even though the courses were pretty brutal. The event consisted of a 20km ride on the Saturday, followed by a 6km downhill race (which I didn’t take part in) and then a 50km race on the sunday.

The 20km course was very technical. Being a mountain, the course relief was pretty much straight up and straight down again. Long, twisting climbs (some with up to 15 switchbacks) followed by bone jarring and very technical singletrack descents. It was what my old friend Tom would describe as “darn technegol”.

I was struggling to find a word to describe it, until half way up the second major climb, a guy passed me and casually remarked; “This is pretty brutal climbing”. Yes. Yes it was. The winner was Murray Spink, an Australian world champion, in a ludicrous time of 1hr 8mins. I came in exactly 1 hour afterwards, with 2hr 8mins.

The 50km course was slightly less technical, but still fell into the “Brutal” category. After a fun and rocky descent off Mt Buller that tried it’s best to rearrange my skeleton, we then began the long ascent up Mt Stirling. The climbing was exceedingly tough, but the view from the top was well worth it. What followed was some of the sweetest trails around, with long flowing descents through Blue-gum forests, followed by tough climbs that made the next descent all the more enjoyable. Again, this race was won by the seemingly super human Murray Spink in 2hr 38mins. I rocked in about 4hr 19mins. I’m quite please with that. I’m aiming for around 8hr 30mins for the 100km, which I anticipate to be flatter course, so looks like I’m on track.

All in all, it was a great weekend (despite my cursing of the course on Saturday – that was the pain talking!), and I highly recommend it for next year!