What was I thinking????

Moose and I decided we would do a pony express race together, as neither of us have raced for over 20 years and we have been living out our racing aspirations through our kids racing. We planned to ride our XR's in the masters class (Over 40's).
What sounded like a great idea at the time whilst drinking beers, turned out to be hours of torture as we experienced the hottest day,I have ever ridden on.
The temperature hovered around 40 degrees C for the duration of the race which contributed to many teams pulling out due to heat stress during the race, not us silly old fools though,we kept lapping the course that was not designed with XR650's in mind. It was hard work and at one stage I experienced head spins and was not enjoying myself at all. The organisers,decided to shorten the race by one hour as a duty of care because people were dropping like flies. This turned out to be in Moose's and my favour, as we happened to be in the lead at the time and we won our class, much to the amazement of everyone there, especially our boys!!
Here are some pics of the day.

Me before the race, asking myself "Have I got rocks in my head, This is no place for a 44 year old smoker on a XR650R" Did I mention I had been at a Buck's party the night before???


The Le Mans start in one of the classes






Me on the gas heading out.


Me Returning to the pits after lap 1


Here is the stage I thought I might have a heart attack.


Moose's wife Cathy, cooling Moose down.


Moose on his way back in


Me waiting to go out


My son, Connor was happy with his result, 3rd in the small wheel 85 class.

Nice job to Father & Son.....

I love to thrash the young guys on there 450's, with the xr, blinkers, plate and all. Good Job! Been thinking about doing one myself.

Springtime Heatwave in Southeastern Australia

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=41438

I'm a dork-it's my homepage...

Wow,way to go Bump, what a cool website..straight to the favourites for that one!!! The race day date fell in the second image. Too hot for racing XR's in tight, rocky single trail!!! WE will do it again but not until winter I think.

on that NASA site you can do a search for the places you ride and, at least for here, one can find a lot of interesting images. Some of the data that accompanies each image is really interesting too.