The first race was the Super D, which was a long stretch of fire road starting off with a very skatey fire road at the beginning and smoothing out towards the end. I managed to get a win for the Super D by just a little over a second.

The Second race was the XCO which is the cross country olympic format race. For this race I needed to finish 3 laps of a 5km circuit. The U19 women category started behind the elite women. I was able to get a good start and be the first of my category to enter the single trail. I was able to maintain first position for the rest of the race with a 10 sec gap between me and second place. Bits of the track were quite challenging with one the climbs incorporating some oober tight switch backs which caused me to come unstuck on a few occasions.

The last race was a point to point. This was 25km which incorporated some long gnarly climbs which seemed to last forever, but the climbs were worth it with some nice downhill single trail towards the end of the race, but we were punished yet again with some more gruelling switch back climbs.  I was yet again able to manage another good start in this race and put a bit over two minutes into second place which was a pleasing win for me.

I managed to get a first for the weekend which was awesome! Hopefully i can hold on to this for the rest of the series.

Throughout the weekend my S-Works Epic was awesome as always. It is always good to be able to alter the suspension with the brain, especially for the Super D. Thanks to Drift Bikes for supporting me and fixing up my bike after three days of brutal punishment. They always do a great job fitting me in when we call in, usually on the way too or from races. Thanks guys!

Holly Harris.

Photos – Russ Baker

After a 1:30am start and a 9 hour drive, Dad and I arrived at Mt Buller for the 2nd round of the 2012 National All Mountain Cup. The new format is run over 3 stages in 3 days, starting with a Super D stage, followed by a standard cross country olympic format race and finished off with a point to point ‘marathon’ style event. Over the course of the weekend, riders get times from each event and, like a road tour, riders with the least time at the end of the 3 events wins the final classification

Friday- Super D.
As a brief overview, Super D is an event which is mostly downhill, yet has obstacles which favour the use of a cross country or all mountain bike over a proper downhill bike. The Buller trail consisted of a 12km downhill, losing a total elevation of 850 vertical metres. The course had a number of short, sharp pinches, 12+ ‘ride through’ river crossings, hairpin corners, loose fireroad and mud sections along with some false flat and major river crossings. With the word being that there had already been a number of accidents, I was running on minimal sleep and was warned to take my two practice runs relatively steady until I knew the course and the obstacles I would be hitting at speed.
I arrived at the start line and was informed that the start order had been reversed at some time throughout the day. I was pretty annoyed about this as I would now be slipped in at the end of the junior Under 19 men. I was really keen for a good result so once the time trial countdown timer went off pretty hard with the aim of picking off riders one by one. I felt as though I was riding within myself in the rough terrain and gave it everything on the uphill pinches and flat sections. I was only held up once on one of the bridges where I had to wait for riders but was fairly certain I hadn’t lost too much time. I crossed the line and stopped the clock at 19min 47sec, first in under 23’s and being one of 3 riders in the whole event to crack the 20 minute mark. Second place Jack Haig was a further 31 seconds behind. Both Dad and I were pretty surprised considering the preparation but as I would find over the whole weekend, I think a lot of the credit went to my S-works Epic 29er which really soaked up a lot of the rough stuff!

Saturday- Cross Country Olympic
I made up on some lost sleep with a big sleep in on Saturday morning and got myself sorted for a 12pm kick off for the more recognised cross country olympic format race. The Under 23 men were starting a minute behind the elite men and completing 5 laps of a 5.1km circuit. Thanks to yesterdays performance, I would begin this stage with a 31 second advantage. I was starting from the second row on the start line but wasnt too worried thanks to a big start straight. The gun went and I was able to manouvre my way to the front and found myself sitting second wheel leading into the first single track section. I was following Search to Retains Luke Fetch who struck some bad luck puncturing in the first kilometer or so. Tyre choice was really important for this course as there was practically no sections that didnt have sharp rock coming from every direction! This also made line choices pretty important also. From this point on I was in the lead with Torq’s Jack Haig glued to my wheel. We stayed this way for most of the race, taking whole, 1 lap turns and opportunities to attack each other and try to break the other. We caught up to 5th in elite men and lapping times quite equal to 4th in elite. Unfortunately on the 5th lap I was following Jacks wheel and stupidly dropped the bike as I accellerated too fast out of a tight corner, in order to keep his pace. It was a silly mistake and something that cost me the race. It took me longer than i would have liked to get up also as both my feet were stuck, clipped into the pedals so as I was stressing and shaking them out of the pedals, I was watching Jack ride off up the fireroad towards the top of the decent. I chased as hard as I could but my efforts weren’t enough. Jack rode a really strong race and I finished 17 seconds down, leaving me with a 14 second advantage leading into Sunday’s stage three. I was pretty down on myself about the result as I knew I was riding within myself and was confident I had the legs to be further up there for the end result. My Specialized again, seemed to be the perfect bike for the job. I found that I could just sit down and drive it over all the rough stuff going up and as a dually, it destroyed the decents, making it seem so easy!

Sunday- Point to Point
The final stage was a 22km marathon race incorporating some of Mt Bullers most fun and famous trails including the hyped up “Stonefly”. In such a small distance, the course covered 800 metres of vertical climbing, making it quite a challenging race and certain to spread everyone out. With a dream start I was leading the race for around 3km until we hit the second section of singletrack where I heard the dreaded sound of a front wheel puncture. Losing around 4 and a half minutes I got going again before realising 1 CO2 canister wasnt enough pressure for my 29er wheel (bigger air volume). So again I had to stop, swap the canister head to my spare canister and try again. After another minute of fiddling around I got going again and was out with a vengence. From the beginning of the day I knew I had the ‘million dollar legs’ feeling so I was keen to do my best given the circumstances. The hard thing was that I was passed by the Junior U19 men and also a number of the elite women. There was a lot of traffic and I did my best to negotiate my way through as fast as I could. I moved through all the juniors again and back into the elite riders. With 2km to go I could see 3rd placed under 23 rider Robbie Hucker up ahead and dug deep to try and catch him. I was hurting pretty bad and crossed the line 4 seconds behind Robbie and 4 min 25sec off Jack Haig’s winning time of 1hr 26:36. I finished in a total time of 1hr 31:01, but with the auto stop feature on my Garmin, which would have cut out the time taken to change the flat, it stopped at 1hr 27sec on the dot which included a tonne of traffic! I knew I was feeling really good on the day so it was just really frustrating that I had to lose the overall lead this way when I was confident I could have contested for the win. Again, credit to Jack who had a superb ride to take the overall. Again it goes without saying, the S-works was a phenomenal ride.

Overall I finished in 2nd position on the final Under 23 classification. Looking forward to Stromlo! Thanks goes to the team at Drift Bikes for sorting me out with last minute tyres and all my other bike related needs for the race!

-Trenton Day

The Jetblack 24 hour came around at a perfect time to smash out some hard fast laps as some pre-season intensity, due to minimal events around the time of Christmas. When Dan McDonald first contacted me about the race, I was a bit dubious however, he put my mind at ease when mentioned the option of the 6+6 hour event. Perfect! This was also going to be special as it would be my first proper race on my new S-Works Epic 29er!
Arriving at 10am with Cam Ivory, we moved into camp with the McDonald family, rego’d and prepped the bikes. The boys passed the first lap onto myself which I was more than happy to do and with less than an hour to race start, I kitted up in the nice bright red colours Drift/Specialized. I snagged a spot on the front row and waited for the countdown. After doing quite a few miles on the new bike in training, I knew what it was capable of and feeling super confident. The start would be a normal lap plus a (roughly) 1.2km start loop. From the word GO, I put the hammer down and gassed it for the full lap coming in with a 26 minute lap and a 2 ½ minute gap back to second. Unfortunately they included the start loop in the overall time for the lap so it was a certainty that it would be broken. I passed onto Cam who then went out and smashed a 25:02 raising the bar. Within our team there was and always is a lot of friendly rivalry so I was determined to get out there and put the S-works at the top! Dan came back from his lap posting a solid 26:34 which was pretty impressive after spending the last week off the bike and at schoolies celebrations! I threw everything I had at this next lap and was super impressed and how well the bike responded. The brain made it very efficient when putting the power down on the big open fireroads however, always engaged at the right time to fix up any mistakes that I made. Renowned for being 29er UN friendly, the Mt Annan track was also full of tight corners, sharp berms and a number of other man made obstacles. Despite all this I was able to throw the bike around like a 26er which I previously would have thought impossible. Its pretty clear that a lot of work went into the development of this bike to make it such a weapon!
I jumped out of the saddle and brought the lap to a finish in a time of 24:31 making it the fastest at the present. Later on in the day everyone started to ease up a bit and before we knew it cam was out for the last lap and wrapped it up at 6:15pm giving us an extra 15minutes to sleep in in the morning!
A big filthy pizza and a good sleep in a real bed at Dan’s house really helped to recharge the batteries and before we knew it alarms were going off in everyone’s room at 5:15am. We headed back out to the course and were stoked we were able to avoid riding 12 hours through the night. Dan kicked things off again and we all agreed to take things pretty steady as we had a lead of around 1 ½ laps. Again the rivalry came back to play and the times started dropping on the way to the 12pm finish! Thankfully I was able to keep the quickest time from the previous day and hold it to the finish of the event.
We walked away with first place in the 3 man elite, 6+6 category and fastest lap of the event ( I think the fastest lap results were wrong?).

Big thanks to the DRIFT boys at Kotara in Newcastle for sorting me out with such a nice bike and tweaking it at such short notice before the race! It rode like a dream and words honestly can’t describe how quick it is! Can’t wait for the next race!!

- Trenton Day

We Just wanna do Something Special for all the Ladies in the World

We now have an exclusive area of our store dedicated just to ladies. Specialized take great pride in their womens range. The aim of our women’s line has always been to deliver a full, uncompromising range of products designed just for females with an option for every woman. Specialized create bikes and equipment that are focused and driven by real needs and wants, whether it’s smaller diameter tubing and lighter bike weights, or tuned suspension. Our products are 100% inspired and built for the women who work for Specialized and the women they meet every single day.

Here’s a great article about some common misconceptions about womens bicycles of which Specialized aim to dispel with their quality range.

The Most Common Misconceptions about Women’s Bikes article

Rider: Emilia Fahlin

How it Works!

1. The Purchase of any Endura Sports Nutrition product from Drift Bikes entitles you to membership of the Loyalty Card.
2. Everytime you buy an Endura Sports product from the list on your membership card, present it to have it signed and dated by one of our staff.
3. For each Endura Sports nutrition product purchase, make sure the staff member records the purchased product and the 10% reward dollars earned.
4. Once enough reward dollars are achieved you can redeem your reward dollars for a FREE Endura Sports Nutrition Product ( n.b. Dollars are not carried over to new loyalty cards)
5. Obtain a new card once you have received your Free Endura Sports Nutrition product and go for gold all over again.

Note: There is no time limit on when you must make a purchase or on when you have to redeem the card for your free Endura Sports Nutrition Product. Redeemable amounts must equate to one of the Endura Sports Nutrition products. Card is not transferable.

Last Sunday while everyone else was dealing with butterflies and last minute mechanicals at the Highland Fling. A small group of us were rolling out of the carpark of the Grand View Hotel Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains aimed at the head of Andersons Trail.

After many months of chin waging about how good it would be I had finally got around to organising it. Our guide at the last minute had injured himself braking a leg literally in an event the weekend prior so we used a combination of combined vague memories of the group and a Garmin Edge 800 and ultimately found our way all the way to the bottom with no major dramas.

Having never riden Andersons before I had no idea what to expect. I had been told that it was mostly firetrail with a big ass climb out at the end. But I what I wasn’t prepared for was the amazing amount of descent in this trail. Some of the descents were eye blurring. I recall seeing fist size rocks being smashed aside out of the corners of my eyes as I tried to retain focus on what was fast approaching in front of me. Sitting on speeds of up to 60km at a time on these road was awesome fun but allowed you to easily forget that whilst as fun as all this descending can be…… what goes down, must at some stage again go up. The trail winds eventually down to a creek crossing at the bottom of the hills which then simply turns you back to the sky with a series of moral breaking climbs, thankfully my Specialized Epic Expert 29er was completely at home in these conditions. The temptation to put a foot down and simply push up the hills was many time tempting but the will to stay slotted in a comfy spinning gear and focus on the reward of getting to the top stayed with me and I was at the end stoked with my efforts.

We climbed all the way out into the sleepy back streets of the mountain town of Woodford then hunted down the trail head of The Oaks. Powering down the first descents was a welcome change to the climbing we had done out of Andersons. Despite having quite a few solid climbs on this trail I would definitely say that I had been desensitised to them from the scale of those I had just conquered on Andersons and was somewhat thankful for it. The Oaks has a somewhat infamous 5km downhill fireroad descent which was of course one of the most anticipated sections for the whole group. Not to disappoint, winding out as fast as I could in my biggest gears for 5 minutes on a downhill fire road was an amazing feeling which has to be tried at least once.

Leading finally to a sweet single track section of smooth bermed corners and rocky multi lined descent we made it to the Glenbrook causeway for the final brutal climb out to the train station home.

This ride is highly recommended whether it be for a great training ride or to look further into the history of the trails you are riding, but ultimately we enjoyed getting out there and riding something a little different to what we are used to riding around here locally at a leisurely pace . Above all any ride that includes 1600 meters of descending is alright in my book.
Special thanks to Peter McGill for guiding us to the relevant trail heads and Steve Rugen, Matt K, Big Stu and Robbie for being a great bunch of guys to ride with. Good times and here’s to more like it.

J.

Simply buy* a Contour Roam camera at Drift Bikes and go in the draw to win the value of your camera in accessories!

That means a chance at winning $299 worth of gear simply for purchasing the worlds lightest, feature packed high definition camera.

PLUS for a limited time you will also get a FREE Contour Backpack when you buy a Contour Roam Camera. Even better reason to get yourself the worlds lightest wearable camera.

*competition starts 17.11.11 and will be announced 28.1.12

The 2011 Briars Highland Fling, the biggest Mountain Bike event in Australia and one I’ve never raced. This was only my 2nd 100km race (well, 112km to be precise). My preparation was not ideal leading up to Sunday’s race in both limited training and having to put my 2 beautiful puppies to sleep on the Wednesday. I was extremely emotional for the remaining days of the week.

We decided to leave just after lunch on Saturday after an easy ride through Glenrock in the morning. When we arrived in the small Southern Highlands town of Bundanoon about 5pm, the place was rockin! All the street corners leading in to town had bikes either on the road sides, in trees or on fences. There were exhibitor stands, music playing and the vibe was awesome. This really got us in the mood to race. “Lez get it awn”

We ate the best dinner we could find at the local Pizzeria, which was pasta, bread and salad.

Sunday morning – 5.30am rise and shine. I think I slept about 1 hour. I have never been so nervous before a race in my life. My hands and body were shaking and all I could think about was how I was going to tackle the start. I was not hungry but forced myself to eat something which consisted of cereal, fruit and half a piece of toast.

It was a mass start so we jumped the queue to get near the front (no time for a warm up). The gun went off and it was fierce. The pace was faster than any National round I have done with the Elite men driving it hard at the front. Nothing I had done could prepare me for the pain that I was about to endure, both physically and mentally. I managed to find last year’s winner and Single Speed World Champion, Heather Logie’s wheel and stuck on it like the proverbial. Naturally, the Elites of both 100k’ers and 50k’ers were up the front sitting well over 50km/hr. There was dust flying everywhere and it was hard to see.

We had travelled about 1km and I found myself being spat out the back of the lead group. I could see Michael sitting on the rear of that group, looking back in hope for me to re-join. My asthma was bad from the dust, so I was finding it hard to breath, my heart was burning and then my legs became so lactic, my pace was becoming slower and slower. I started to panic as I had lost Heather’s wheel and saw my heart rate above 200bpm! I was thinking “what the **** have I got myself in for?”, but then realised that I was still passing some of the other Elite riders. I managed to get on the back of another enduro specialist, Vanina Vergoz, calmed myself down and got into a rhythm. When the dust settled, Vanina and I rode together at a high, but comfortable pace. I soon began to get my breathing under control and my legs seemed to feel a lot stronger. I decided to go on my own and as I upped the tempo, my new Specialized Epic 29er from DRIFT BIKES just did the rest along the undulating fire road.

The first stage (27kms) was reasonably easy going comparatively, with a few hike-a-bike creek crossings and a lot of fire roads that had some very challenging hills – a lot of hills actually. I decided not to stop at the first transition as I had plenty of food and fluids on board.

The second stage (53kms) was really fun. It had some of the best single track I’ve ridden. There was a variety of flowy and fast single trail, rocks, technical sections, gullies and more undulating fire roads. There were long and fast downhill fire roads, but guess what? What goes down must come up! In this stage was the mother of all hills called ‘THE WALL’ – don’t need to say much more. The bike felt awesome, I rode fast and smooth and started to get some flow. I felt really good at this stage, but my legs were becoming fatigued and started to cramp. I stopped at the 2nd transition area this time to be greeted by my wonderful husband Michael who had completed his Half Fling (6th in Vets). I was very tired so he helped me load up with food and water for the remaining stage. He gave me some motivational words and sent me on my way. After 80kms, I was feeling pretty exhausted but soldiered on.

The final stage (32kms) was physically draining. There were sandy fire roads, steep paddock climbs, creek crossings – some you could ride, others you had to hike your bike through again, and rough, rocky single track. This stage seemed to take forever as the track was slow and did not have much flow. There were sections that were muddy and this is where I had the crash of the day. I came to a big pool of mud that looked rideable and had tyre marks through it, so I decided to ride it with little caution. BIG MISTAKE. My front tyre sunk completely, and over the handle bars I went, still clipped into my pedals, I was covered in mud. I could not move, and felt my right leg over extend, thinking at this point I had torn something. I could not unclip and there was nobody around. After a couple of minutes I finally felt relief so I yanked my bike up out of the mud and just gathered myself together. With at least 15km to go I was not sure whether I would make it back. I had some energy gel, food and plenty of water and thought to myself what Michael always tells me – ‘Toughen up Princess’ (actually I have changed his words to make it PG). I seemed to find some grunt toward the end and began to motor past people along the final, hard packed fire roads. I turned off into another paddock and at last I could see the tents and hear the Race Caller on the microphone. I can’t stress enough the relief I felt when I came up the last hill towards the finish line.

I was extremely happy to see Michael as he yelled out ‘You got 5th’, pointing to the electronic timing board in 5 hours and 31 minutes. Toughest race I’ve done and over the moon with my performance but very, very relieved to have finished – will I do the Highland Fling again? Yea probably!