NZ summer cycling - a Canterbury tail...

Posted February 28th, 2008 by Ian Marshall

Team Keyne

The final week of my holiday in NZ and after gaining permission from the Mrs

to take a break from the family holiday, managed to meet up once again with ex MKCC club mate Bob Knight and his familiy in Rangiora, Christchurch, who emigrated some 2 years ago. For those who don't know of Bob's varied cycling interests, Bob took over to NZ a rare mix of bikes - road/TT/recumbent/veteran/tandem/penny farthings (2No. !!!) and still races/rides them on a regular basis and is the current NZ National recumbent champion!!! Took in a couple of his regular training routes on near deserted roads, the Weka Pass (61km) and the Lyttleton 'crater' ride above Christchurch (115km and 7000ft accent!!!) Bearing in mind the second ride was during the working week there were a lot of chaps (and girls...) out training!!!

My second cycling port of call was with Jeff Hathaway's Brother, Paul (and his family) in Timaru, some 100miles south of Christchurch in Southern Canterbury. Paul is the custodian of Brother Jeff's new 'holiday bike, a brand new Kiwi designed EMC2 carbon road bike, and I'd been given the honour of giving it a damn good thrashing!!! Paul had taken Wednesday off work to guide me round one of his favourite training routes (and recover from the previous evenings blow out birthday meal!!!) The 80km route, again on exceptionally quiet roads, took in the challenging Tiako Valley and Pauraga Gorge, enough to break into a sweat on more than one occasion and utilise the larger sprockets available.

Thought that was it for the day but agreed to make a showing at Timaru Cycling Club's final summer Wednesday evening race event, an apparently 'gentle' 16km/7 lap handicap RR on the small and twisting South Canterbury Levels Motor Raceway, being used this weekend for the noisy V8 Holden/Ford national race series this coming weekend (don't know how they overtake!!!), again putting Jeff's bike to the test. Reality was a windy night with a strong head wind along the finish straight with 45 riders setting off at 30 second intervals in groups of 5. Paul and myself were 2 mins 30 secs down so had a bit of catching up to do. We had been warned the Nicol Cook of NZ had turned up, Nicol Begg, the World ladies in-line speed skating champion, but whether it was the windy or cool conditions, she got dropped from the break much to everyone's relief. With 2 laps to go the final group got caught but by now the group was fairly fragmented due to the continued attacks along the wind assisted back straight. On the final lap Paul just lost contact (athough was well ahead of of many riders half his age!!!) and I had managed to find myself in a leading splinter group of 5 riders. With the finish in the distance and no one willing to lead out into the head wind I darted across the track in the hope no one would latch onto my wheel. Unlucky for for me, local sprinter and regular winner, Cameron Alexandra, managed to jump on and pipped me on the line, but I was more than pleased with second (1st loser!!!) considering my legs had not raced since September. On return to Paul's house Jeff 'phoned from the UK (for the second time in a day) to check that his precious bike had performed ok (and hadn't been stacked!!!) I'm now looking forward to a low level season of LVRC road racing after a few years break from bunch racing...

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