24hr World Championships - Finale Ligure, Italy
In the middle of last year I made the choice to take a step back from the Xterra circuit, where I had enjoyed a level of success for nearly a decade, and dabble in some solo 24hr endurance racing.
The first main aim for this switch was to race at the 2017 world championships in Finale Ligure, a normally Enduro destination on the Italian Riveria. Last weekend that box was ticked, and with a very satisfying top 10 result too. There's still a massive amount for me to learn about what is a very unique discipline, but I can still be satisfied with my performance on what was a very tough day out on the bike!
Being as there's 24 hours of actual racing, running from 10am Friday to 10am Saturday, the race is actually a 3 day affair with registration and recce laps on the Thursday. The race in Finale has run for over a decade, but this is still Italy and so the course was actually unmarked until after we'd started the first lap on Friday morning - a little tricky to learn the 10km course then!
The lap was much more technical than most used for endurance racing, using sections from the EWS race in Finale and containing nearly 300m of climbing on each rocky, dusty lap. temperatures were also high as you'd expect for June, peaking in the mid 30s celsius and staying above 20 even in the middle of the night. The general consensus was that the course was suitably brutal for a world championships, and the high DNF rate even at this level would seem to agree.
My own race went to plan until a shut down in the early hours meant I took a short unplanned rest, but I managed to maintain a good even pace and finish well within the top 10 in my race when the aim was a top 20 finish. I was able to maintain concentration better than in previous races which is something we have been working on with Jon from E3C Coaching and frankly pretty important faced with large drop offs, tight technical climbs along cliff edges and of course a long descent of berms all through the night!
The Giant XTC Advanced 29 again proved itself more than up for the challenge of even these events, and the 30T Rotor chainring operated with an XT 11-46T cassette was amazing on the steep technical climbs!
The next big race for me is the British 24 hour championships in Plymouth the last weekend of July, with the Montytrax and Scott MTB 'non-competitive' marathons before then as well.
