After a month of solid training I was pretty pooped but keen to see how the body would go at round 3 of the Huttcross 2024 season in Moonshine Park. I had committed to the mud tyres this time around, although the forecast was good for the race: the ground was now saturated.
Moonshine is a classic Huttcross venue, and one that I enjoyed designing silly off-camber chicanes for back when I was on the Huttcross committee. Sadly the stopbank is now less used than Huttcross’ early days, partly because we did too much damage to the bank and the council were (probably rightly) afraid that we might destabilise the bank.
I rode out to the race with Gav, Sam, Laura and Liam and his dad Jason. There was a relatively mild northerly headwind for us while we pootled up the Hutt River trail, and the northerly persisted through the racing. Thankfully, the longest straight on the course (about 400m) was run as a tailwind section, so we didn’t have to worry too much about the wind.
The course for this round at Moonshine was mostly run at the northern end of the park, taking in lots of tight turns around the Totara trees, as well as some nice wider corners and straights around the bigger gum trees. The going was mostly dry, but with a little slime on top in some sections making for some slick turns. I counted more than 20 180 degree turns on the 5 minute lap which really limited the speed.
When I saw who had turned up for A grade this week I was a little apprehensive but keen to see how I would go against all these hitters. Liam (who has been getting better with every race), Callum Kennedy, Caleb Botcher, Ari Scott and Jim Ashley were all there. Jim, Ari and Liam all beat me at round 2, so I felt like I had a point to prove!
My plan for this race was to try and get a good hard 40 minutes out to mimic the upcoming National Champs race. I still haven’t had my NZ citizenship come through, so I won’t be able to race the elite race at the NZ national champs this year and the masters category race is only 40 minutes long. I also knew that my legs were not feeling fresh and I didn’t expect to have much real sustained top end but I wanted to challenge myself to push good power for the ~1 minute flat straight section on the stop bank.
I got a good position on the front row again for this race along with all the hitters. The three of us Cal* riders (Callum, Calum and Caleb) were together with me in the middle. From the gun Callum leaned on me and I leaned on Caleb and I managed to edge out in front of them. Into the first corner, Jim was leading, with me in second. We both took quite different lines as I tried to get more flow through the corners while looking for the overtake.
After a few turns I managed to get around Jim and tried to open a gap before the twisty section through the Totara. There werw two shorter straighter sections before the Totara turns and I made the most of kicking hard through those to open a gap. In the Totara turns I tried my best, but I didn’t feel like I ever got these corners particularly well and mostly ended up using this section as a chance to recover rather than getting frustrated.
Out of the Totara turns section I had a small gap of a few metres to the rest of the pack and decided that the gap was large enough that I could kick away without taking everyone with me on the open stop bank straight. I jumped up to 800W to accelerate onto the stop bank then tried to hold 450W the rest of the way along the stop bank. This seemed to open the gap a bit more.
From there I set about kicking where I could and recovering through the twisty sections where I didn’t think I would be losing much time - in hindsight at least one of these sections would have been faster to run, but it was a balance of speed and saving energy.
I made a few mistakes in the middle of the race which lost of a few seconds, but I managed to pull myself back together before the end. In the end I took the win by just over a minute with fairly consistent lap times. On the last two laps I could really feel my glutes screaming at me while I tried to keep getting out over 400W along the stop bank. It still baffles me that friends in the UK can do 400W at threshold…
This was a good fun race and a nice confidence boost that the training is doing useful things. I’m looking forward to starting some ‘cross specific work for the next two blocks before national champs, and then racing in the UK, where I look forward to getting my head kicked in by some really good riders!
Banner phto: ATPhoto.