DISC Session #16 with ABOC

"make sure that my bike is absolutely tip-top hunky-dory super-duper ridgey-didge before tomorrow's DISC session"

Ahahahahaha. Hahahaha. Hahaha. Haha. Ha.

But wait, let's start at the beginning, shall we? First up, powerjumps on 99" - three out of the saddle (including one warmup) and one in the saddle. Two 41km/hrs and one 44km/hr (91RPM) not bad from ~10-15km/hr. Seated was harder, of course, and didn't quite get on top of the gear by the 1/4 lap, finishing at 38/82.

Next drill was powerjumps from behind the motorbike on 92", jumping out of the draft at about 35km/hr and going for a half lap. Well, I made it about 50 metres (depends how much of the slide you count, really!) before ending up on the infield on my arse. Not entirely sure what happened yet, except that something seemed to slip in my drivetrain somewhere - the cog is the chief suspect here. Up until now I've always saved such a situation, but not this time - down I went. Nothing too bad - little bit of grazing, small hole in the knicks, but nothing worse than that. I've managed to find a video of the incident:

Well, it was something like that. Except for the staying upright bit and the lack of being run into by someone else. And the... everything, really!

Anyway, I checked the bike out and nothing seemed to be wrong - wheel was still centred (slightly out of true, but not much) and the cog was on tight. So I put stuff back together again, tightened everything, and went back out for some ducking and diving!

This time we did one lap over, one lap under, one lap ducking and diving and then on the final lap, at some point the rear rider jumped and raced to the line. I took the lead for the first one, and was quite happy with the way I managed to ride while looking backwards - I didn't look forwards at all for the entire time, and while I won't claim I maintained a dead-straight line, I was fairly smooth at least. In both efforts I lifted my front wheel slightly off the ground a couple of times in the sprint, possibly because of the smaller gear (back to 86" I think it was) but only very slightly.

We finished with a 500m windout behind the motorbike, with a last 100m sprint. Nothing too exciting to report there, only hit a top of 58.9/144 on 86". Always a nice way to finish the evening though.

Brief stats here.