The Giant Odyssey 50km mountain bike race was held in Forrest at the end of April. I survived. I enjoyed parts. I need lots of work on my handling skills. I didn’t crash, and the only injuries were to my pride. I will be back!
As you can see from the altitude graph below, it was a brutal course, with over half the distance on single track and a lot of technical sections, especially in the later stages. (For the observant readers: no, I didn’t do the course in 3:55 as Endomondo is reporting. My Garmin Fenix was set to auto-pause in cycling mode when I’ve stopped, so it screwed up my timing stats. I will change that for the next race.)
A note to self: when you’ve only mountain biked six times before, fitness is not enough to get you through 50km. My lack of technical skills seriously hindered me in the last 15km of the course, but I didn’t need any skills to walk up hills like this:
