Mountain Biking 13:00:00 [3]
MTB to halfwaybay
Made good progress through the road section after a café stop. The pie and frittata were awesome. Continued making good progress all the way to Walter Peak.
We made the decision as a group to try going round the lake shore from Walter Peak. There were a number of reasons why we decided to do this.
- It looked like a feasible route on the map and that the maps had been set up to offer the route choice given the marking of out of bounds areas etc
- We figured there was likely to be some sort of way to join the two dead end tracks together
- We felt we were not going to beat the other two teams on speed alone and had to do something different. There was little opportunity for this in this race so we took the only option.
- We figured it would make us of break us. It turned out it did neither.
Unfortunately we stuck to the lake shore and tried to traverse around the beaches rather than hunting for animal tracks up high through the scrub. It had looked like the lake option would have worked everywhere from Glenorchy until where we got stuck so that's why we tried it. We ended up stuck with deep water and cliffs and turned around. We tried briefly bashing up to find a track that a passing boat had mentioned but I think we had all lost heart by this stage and didn't want to waste more time. On reflection we probably should have left the bikes and bashed around for a bit. Instead we turned around, had a wee cry and went over the pass.
Luckily our lead was big enough that T7 and the weasels hadn't caught us and we were able to put a bit of time into them through their misfortune before transition. Left transition before they arrived much to our pleasure.
We rode pretty well for this whole ride. I was feeling quite happy and really enjoyed the bit from the saddle to transition. Finally felt like the work I had done on the bike prerace was paying off a bit.