The
pre-able.
Our first
event was the Beechworth 6hr Endurance race "Six Hours In The
Saddle" (S.H.I.T.S.) Glenn and I entered as a two man open age team.
We left the night before the race at about 7PM. The intention was to
have a good nights rest but an accident on the Hume Hwy put pay to
that with a two hour delay. On arrival, around midnight, we managed
to upset our neighbours who kindly advised us it was time to sleep
with knocking on the walls. We were up at 7AM (not well rested as I
never sleep well in a strange bed) and with a head cold that was
just a sniffle the day before.
The race.
We found the event site and set up our tent, registered and waited
for the race to begin. The race was about ten minutes late in
starting and the traffic was really dense. We managed 9 laps of the
10Km circuit which put us in 39th position out of 50 pairs. The full
results are available at
Beechworth results
How did the
Mojo go?
My best time was my third outing at 34:06. The Mojo gave no trouble
at all. I did most of my passing on the climbs. There was a really
long climb from about the half way mark till the blissful down hill
home run (dirt road) to the transition point. Each break saw me eat,
drink, change my riding gear and brush/lube the drive train on the Mojo. The DW rear link system really works well with minimal 'bob',
I'm used to a hard tail so thought that the plush rear end would
feel strange. The reality is that I seldom found it necessary to use
the 'ProPedal' feature on the Fox Float RP23 rear shock. I got the
bike I
noticed a rear end squirm under hard cornering this is due to a little more
lateral flex in the rear swing arm than Ibis
Ibis web site would like to
admit, but once you get used to it, there really is no degradation
in performance that I can attribute to this motion. I took the rough
stuff as fast as I could which is something I'd never been
able to do on my old bike.
A Mojo
moment.
At the
transition tent whilst waiting for the change overs I had lots of
people asking me about the Mojo. From a distance I even spied one
curious fellow lift the Mojo to see how much she weighed (I was
pleased when he put it down again). There was one other Mojo at the
event and I meant to trade E-mail addresses with the owner.
Unfortunately I forgot in the hurry to wrap my mouth around one of
those beautiful country Rump Steak at the Transwells Commercial
Hotel. I finally made it home to a familiar bed around midnight
after a somewhat quiet drive home as my voice had succumbed to my
head cold shortly after hitting the road.
First
service.
The Mojo goes into
VicMTB this week for it's first (free) service. There are only
two things that need addressing. One is the front derailleur
position needs adjusting as it touches the chain when using the
higher gears. The other is that I want to remove 15 to 20mm from
each side of the handlebars at 700mm the
Easton Monkylite XC's bar is huge and on several occasions I have
been halted at narrow openings between trees.
Next Blog.
Next time I will show you how I've protected the Mojo's Carbon
Fibre from chain slap and stone chip damage.
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© 2006
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