Bendigo 12 Hour of Hard Knocks

Our local club's 12 hour which was initially scheduled for March was run on the weekend. It was initially postponed due to extreme heat and fire ban issues, this weekend was a totally different kettle of fish, clear crisp skies, frost and bonfires all round!

The event was organised as a fundraiser to help get our local boy, Robbie Hucker over to Italy for the 

world Championships in July. 

It was a really fun weekend and felt had a huge presence at the race, Matt Wallace and Josh 

Fleming teamed with local gun Trevor Watchman to take out the men's pro 3's, Jaci Low rode a com

mendable 12 laps solo, and myself along with the city 

SLACKER'S, Nik and Muz made up the numbers in the mixed fours category! 

The course was great as a home track always is. Lots of rocks, fast flowing descents, and short punchy climbs, I take my hat off to all the solo riders as it was 

really quite a demanding course to ride repetitively.

Felt City was set up and we had a had huge presence for the day. The racks were chock a block full of felt bikes.

A big thanks to Muz and Nik for making the trip to the country and helping get the felt name out and about, we must definitely do it again sometime!

Chase The Sun # 1

Sunday was the first of the Chase the Sun Enduro Series, for me it was the first enduro event that I had raced with the support of the Felt crew. It was great to touch base with everyone again and to also meet some new faces.

Jaci Low and myself were entered to do the Elite Female Pro Pairs, which I was looking forward to, having only ever raced against Jaci. It was nice to be able to combine our skills in a teams event.

I started the ball rolling with a couple of laps off the start line. There were pile ups and congestion a plenty, lucky there was a decent amount of fire road to sort us all out quite quickly! After coming off our initial set of doubles were we found that we had lost contact a little with the other girls, Jaci also came in off her second lap with a deraliuer that decided it didn't want to work, lucky Rob Eva of SRAM got her back up and running in no time with a replacement!

After a couple of hours we had slotted our selves into second place behind the Torq team of Kath O'Shea and Tory Thomas,  but with the King and Fisher Duo very close behind! It was tight racing from here on in, with minutes separating 2nd and 3rd place. Niki Fisher allegedly flatted on the course which gave us a little breathing space but the inform Jenni King soon managed to close the gap and put some time into us.

At the days end we rolled into transition in 3rd place just a couple of minutes off second. The winning combination of Kath and Tory from Torq was just too hard to beat, both recently returning from a stint of fast World Cup races in Europe.

It was a nice change having 4 competitive women's teams at an Enduro, it actually became all about racing, whereas usually there is only one strong combination and the guess work and excitement is taken out of the race. So well done girls, women's mtbing is coming together quite nicely.

Big thanks to the Felt Team for supporting Jaci and I and also big ups to Full Gas Promotions for organising another fun event. Look forward to seeing you all at #2 on the 1st of June!