THE AUTUMN OF GRAVEL

By EAT MORE LARD

April 3^rd, 2018

The poor old Road BIKE

From historic single track, to heat and dust, to an all-nighter in the rain and finally a celebration of Belgium's finest. It's been a cracking time to ride the roads less paved. The road bike has been collecting dust of a different kind, sadly neglected and relegated to commuting duty only.

The overarching theme of gravel and off-road riding this year has been rain. More to the point, the fact that we haven't had any rain. I can remember only two days of rain this year. - once on the Alpine Classic and once on the Oppy 24hr! Yes, during the two main events of my cycling calendar. It was the first time that either had been wet for me after a fair few number of years of trying. Between those rainy days, its been super dry and dusty out there on the back roads.

DuST!

Or was it chocolate? The Goldfields track from Hepburn to Castlemaine was one of my favourite rides last year so it must be time to do it again? This time we were going to push on to Bendigo and get the train from there. At least, that was the plan. Just getting out to the trail from Woodend through the Wombat forest is a treat. There are so many roads and tracks through there. You could spend a decade exploring! By the time we hit Hepburn, it was warming up nicely. I'd forgotten about that short 5km from Hepburn to the Chocolate Mill (hmmmm!). It's all up or down some of it not rideable, at least not for me, even on the (wise choice of the) mountain bike.

After that it's majestic flour-like dusty trails, the odd pinch of death to deal with, some big rocks and that amazing section through Porcupine Ridge. It was hot, though, really hot. We had to refill with fart water at Vaughan Springs as it was 38C in the shade. Time was grinding away rapidly and with one of us suffering a puncture, we called it at Castlemaine. The Bendigo leg could wait for another day.

GOLD!

I’ve ridden the Audax Grand Ridge Randonnee a few years ago but never its sister ride Gippsland Gold. It shares a few sections but in contrast to GRR, it runs south-north from Yarragon to Foster. GRR runs predominately east-west. The forecast was for a hot windy day which at least made for a pleasantly mild early morning climb out of Yarragon and onto the ridge. After a few glorious sections we were picking our way through the rubble of the plantation track before our first control point at Boolarra staffed by the ever amazing volunteers and a smorgasbord of goodness. I was experimenting with equipment today, on the commuter with the widest tyres I could fit (more on that later), 32mm, but at least setup tubeless. For anyone serious about gravel, you need to go tubeless. It definitely saved me some time on the roadside through the roughest sections.

Morwell River Rd out of Boolarra was a highlight, meandering through a deep valley, following the river slightly uphill on a beautiful surface. It was the pre-cursor to climbing back onto the ridge on a rough track that was now in full sun. By the time we got to Foster, we needed a break.

The mercury was rising further with the hot wind and we battled it all the way out of Foster to Mirboo North where the checkpoint was in an air-conditioned hall! Don't mention the pull out of Mirboo again - airless, relentless and on a newly surfaced road that was emitting all sorts of unpleasant gasses!

The return leg to the finish and beer was a beautiful undulating ride bookended by the crackerjack descent into Yarragon. Gold indeed.

RAIN!

Cometh the 24hrs, cometh the rain.

The last few weeks had been preparation for the Audax Oppy 24hr team time trial. We had mapped out a 400km route that was mainly gravel. It seemed appropriate that we had named our team the Dirty Dudes as it was indeed uber-dirty. Last week's experiment with equipment has been discarded due to tyre clearance issues and I was back on the bike I should have been on, the Slate. By the end of 24 mucky hours, even the gravel bike needed a little TLC!

It has been so dry recently but the forecast for the Oppy told us we would get wet. It started 2 hours in as we dropped into Macedon and finally stopped after we left Castlemaine 12 hours later, although there were a few dry breaks in there as well. We were all gritty and chain lube was going down faster than free beer at the office party. As Marty would say, "it should be clear by X", insert next checkpoint here, but it rarely did!

We made some questionable route choices down some dodgy single track that burnt time so that we were 40 minutes down by the time he hit Daylesford with 5 hours to go. Little did we know that the support car nearly failed to make it to Daylesford at all. A flat battery necessitated a jumpstart from a good samaritan at 1am in Taradale, no mean feat!

Somehow we clawed the time back after Daylesford and made it to Ballarat with 6 minutes to spare! In between we discovered some majestic gravel roads and our bodies and equipment held up amazingly well considering the conditions and some user error with lighting (who knew that bringing batteries but not the light would be a problem?).

CORRUGATIONS NOT COBBLES

We rounded out this little run of gravel with our own Ronde, taking in many of the favourite local gravel roads in the Macedon Ranges. The flagship section was the massive stretch of 15m of cobblestones near Drummond! End of summer conditions made for some rough going in places with sometime smooth roads now heavily corrugated late into a period of dry weather. In fact, it looked like Colorbond had been used to shape the surface.

The reward for our bounce around the Ranges was a spectacular sunset followed by a dark dash to the Holgate pub in Woodend for a celebratory beer or two and hot chips! Even a pinch flat from an over-enthusiastic Captain failed to hasten the chase to the pub and the end of our little block of gravel.

Thanks to the crew who joined the various rides - Marty (a.k.a the Captain), Mark, Tiff, Wade, Jim, Matt and Damian. Special thanks to Blair and Tiff for support crew on the Oppy and putting up with the madness. Thanks to my family for the never ending support. Finally thanks to Audax for both the Oppy and Gippsland Gold.