Saturday today and a few people feeling the big 50KM day on Friday. Today brings a mixture of stages with an optional night stage with a large $1000 prize on offer for first male and female. The main stage today in the morning takes place on the Marchwiel property owned by David Walsh (of Mona fame). A controlled transit stage wound it’s way out of Kellevie to the property where we would start a time trial (TT) on a 15KM loop around the property. Today was quite windy and cool with the wind chill so we were rugged up a bit on the transit.

Everything was seeded slowest to fastest this morning and we set off in 30 second intervals to lap the course as fast as possible. Some climbing on the first half and fast descents on the last half followed by a gravel grind into the head wind to finish with the stronger partner protecting the other from the wind as much as possible.

Once the TT was finished we had a quite hilly transit back to Kellevie into a gale force wind at times. Sharon benefited from my hand on the back up some of the hills and apparently some elite rider took over from me and gave Liz a push as she left quite a bit before me on the return transit. On the way back we road through the Falls Festival site. The Marchwiel property is only open to the public 2 times a year, once for Falls and the other for HellFire Cup.

Back at Kellevie more awesome lunches for us and plenty of downtime till the next stage at 5:30PM. Stage 5 was another relay stage with each partner doing a 9KM loop around the village that was exactly the same as the 24HR HillBilly lap so I was salivating at the prospect of doing another fast lap on a track I knew so well. I went first this time and put myself in the hurt locker for quite a bit of the lap and punched out a good time before swapping over to Liz. Sharon had a great lap as well benefiting from all the laps she did on my ride days before the 24HR earlier in the year.

Stage 6 was optional for me but I had said I would ride around with Sydney Liz as it was compulsory for her in the half satan but unfortunately she crashed on stage 5 and had her wrist all strapped up and could not ride. I decided to do it anyway and there was a surprise for me as they had dressed up my bike in fairy lights for some fun effects. The $1000 was way out of reach when a couple of the elites lined up for it (was out of reach anyway without the elites). Great fun lap on some track at Kellevie I had not ridden before so I took it easy and had some fun, no use crashing on an optional stage at night. The climb up and over the hill was a lot steeper than I was expecting.

Once the night stage was finished there was a bit of a party atmosphere starting to evolve with only a couple of short stages on the last day to finish off. Most of the category positions were settled with only small amounts of time gain possible on the very short stages tomorrow. The first stage tomorrow is called the “elevator” and although it’s short it has the steepest hill of the event to climb. Results here.

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