Jason English

2012 Tathra 100

I found it very tough to decide what race to do on this particular weekend. My options were a local 24hr race, the Wombat 100 which was part of the XCM marathon series or the Tathra 100. After talk of increased single track on an already fun track I was off to Tathra!

The weekend starts on Saturday with a 10km time trial. This always seems like a crazy thing to be doing the day before the main event but it is a good chance to see some of the single track. For some reason they started me off last meaning I got to pass lots of riders. It was a great track they had put aside for this event which ended up being closer to 13km. Despite the amount of rain that was falling all over the state I was beginning to feel optimistic about a relatively dry race.

Dinner was booked for 8pm and I had the best intentions of making this appointment until I was falling asleep at the computer around 7:30pm as I tried to do some school work. Andrew from Trek deserves a big thanks for doing the breakfast shopping which had me primed for the main event.

From the start I was trying to imagine the pain that the elite boys will be inflicting at the Convict 100 in a couple of weeks time and so I tried to replicate the pace that I felt I would need to maintain for the first part of the race. I cant remember the last time I have blown up in a 100km race so I thought I would try going fairly quick and see how I pull up. Around the 40km my legs were starting to feel hammered. I tried to keep the pace on through to the 50km checkpoint as I knew the final 50km was mostly single track.

At the 50km drink station it was time to swap bottles and smash some fruit cake. I wasn't game to use the Easter eggs or other tasty treats provided as a race fuel for the remaining part of the race. At this point in the race I felt like I was rather clean, the early sections seemed quite dry.

The last 40km was fantastic. It had some really fun sections of track. Lots of berms and flowy single track which made me think they had saved the best for last. It was in this section that the track did get a little wet in parts but this was just to link all the fun sections together.

With the over 35 age group starting 30mins ahead I was starting to run out of time to catch them all! I had almost forgot I was racing as I was too busy having fun. It was with 2km to go that I caught up to the leading over 35km rider Brett Bellchambers who was having a great race to finish 4th overall on his single speed!

A big thanks to everyone involved with the Tathra 100. It was great to come back again and see a whole community involved with running such a good event.