First build day

With just over a month to go till the race and things are getting hectic. I had my first build day out on the course over the weekend which had a turnout of 11 people and we got plenty of track built.

The problem with running these days is you don't get a lot of time to take photo's. These ones below are courtesy of Mad Aussie of MTB Dirt


This is one of the berms in the switch back being laid out, and then once built. These have ended up 4.5-5m radius to try and maintain riders speed and minimise braking (and braking ruts). Its still slower than I planned so I'm going to extend the berm uphill to try and hold more speed through them.

The creek crossing (with bridge) is now out, there was just going to be too much work to cut the approachs into the steep side slope. The track has now been re-routed (again) further up the hill to take advantage of the easy build- but hopefully with enough side slope to shed water.

A few of the lessons learnt from the day:

• Your planning and flagging won't be right, be prepared to tweak alignments
  
• Build your switchbacks BIG if you want to maintain speed
• Take advantage of volunteers expertise
  
• Don't over-extend your workers, big bench cuts demoralise the crew quickly
  

With the race being so soon, there isn't going to be time for the tracks to ridden in, so this means extra earthwork to build them ready to ride. Its one of my pet hates to turn up to races to find the tracks half done, so I'll be spending a lot of time out at the course making them as pefect as possible.

My cumulative time working on track: 36hrs
Total work time for track: 126hrs