New Zealand MTB Championships

It's hot. The sky is clear and blue, and the wind can't penetrate up Brook Creek Valley. Here is where New Zealand's best mountain bikers have come to claim the title of National Champ.

After a frenzied start I head upwards. And upwards, and upwards. The hill is unrelenting, and I offer a weak smile or a word of encouragement to the riders passing me. The fans emplore everyone to go on. "Almost there," I tell myself, or others, but hey I thought I was almost there a while back now. So what the hell do I know. I keep going up, till the top, where I can look down at a steep descent. The kind of descent where it sounds like a runaway boulder crashing through the woods as it heads downhill. The kind of descent where it feels like your bike is going to break apart beneath you, and you can only pray for an easy landing. Maybe a soft rock or something.

Hey, they have all kinds of weird shit in New Zealand.

A soft rock is not out of the question.

But the race goes on. And on. And long after legs and lungs have given out, long after what ever point the riders were out to prove surely must have been proven, the race goes on. Every lap a little slower, every climb up that hill a little longer.

"Is this the last lap?" an optimistic fan asks a passing rider. She musters up the strength to shake her head: No.

"Bugger," he responds.

Another rider slogs up the hill, walking his bike besides him. "This is bullshit!" he screams out before finding a flat to remount and keep going up. No one disagrees.

Indeed. Because this is not a race anymore. It's a war of attrition, and the hill is winning. Chains snap, riders huff and puff up the hill, pull up under the ropes, and head for their cars. Somedays you don't have it. Some days you do, it's just that the hill has more of it. So you do the best you can with what you got to work with. Some drop out. The rest carry on. At least for now.

Two hours after the start: hot, dehydrated, and exhausted, I pull out after the 6th lap. I glance one more time around at the racers still battling, the crowd still cheering, and I head for home. I think to myself, "Self, that could have been so much worse. What if you actually had to ride that thing?"