As in previous years, the ACT Parks and Conservation Service is pleased to provide the venue for the Kowalski Classic mountain bike race. Parks and Conservation Service is responsible for the management of parks, reserves and rural lands including all commercial pine plantations.

The Kowalski is held at Kowen Forest. Though a commercial pine plantation, it also has a major focus on multiple uses. Pine plantations play a vital role in providing a recreational facility for residents of the ACT and surrounds. ACT plantations have hosted 30,000 participants through sporting clubs and events over the past year.

Until recently, commercial harvesting in Kowen has been on hold since priority was put into salvage harvesting from the 2003 bush fires. Harvesting recommenced in Kowen in 2009. First thinning has been the priority in an attempt to return it to an actively growing and productive plantation. All harvesting is scheduled around major events such as the Mont 24 Hour Race and Kowalski Classic.

Today’s forest management practices aims to protect the remnant natural forests, soil and water quality and cultural heritage sites while also allowing for sustainable timber production. Sustainability ensures the forests are ‘here today and tomorrow’- good news for all mountain bikers.

Enjoy your ride and be responsible

Whenever you are riding in Kowen, to make your experience more enjoyable and to minimise your impact, please observe the following:

• Stay away from all operations and machinery when timber harvesting is taking place. Logging trucks use the roads (potentially day and night) so please take care exiting single tracks onto logging roads.
• Respect the rights of other users including walkers, joggers and horse riders. They have the same rights as you so let them go about their activities without interference.
• If you meet other forest users, announce your presence well in advance. Slow right down as you pass, giving them right of way.
• Do not ride in large groups. Small groups are more manageable.
• To prevent the spread of weeds and plant diseases, keep your bike clean.
• Avoid riding in wet, muddy conditions. The tracks you leave behind channel rain water which leads to erosion. If puddles extend across the trail, ride through them rather than widening the trail by going around.
• Leave animals, plants and rocks where you find them.
• Please take all your rubbish home.
• Politely explain to other mountain bike riders who are not following this code that mountain bike riding will remain an accepted recreational pursuit in the forest areas if everyone keeps to these guidelines.

They’re very intense hours. Let’s, for the sake of the maths, say a lap takes an hour. You do a warm up (you DO do a warm up, don’t you?), then you’re off!

The first few minutes disappear in a world of excitement, quickly overtaken by the inevitable grimace as your body gets up to race pace and starts to tell you all about it. From there, if you’re lucky, you’ll enter that trance-like place where time is irrelevant until you cross the line – but more likely you’ll just hurt (if you’re doing it right).

It takes a long time to get up that climb, but no time to get through the good bit.

That guy in front is managing his time better than you, because he’s moving through the landscape quicker than you and it’s going to hurt him for less.

The moments after you cross the line the first time are great, but you know it’s not over yet – not by a long chalk.

But is that it? Boiled down, does a 24 hour race just come down to four hours on the bike?

Don’t be silly. That’s only part of it. If your time at the race is only valuable when you’re puffin’ – you ARE doing it wrong.

A 24 hour race should start, properly, the week before the race – when you’re packing for the event, swapping emails with your team to be sure you’ve left nothing behind – getting excited.

And you’re ripping yourself off if the 24 hour race itself doesn’t last at least 48 hours. I’ve always felt sorry for anyone who doesn’t turn up till 11am Saturday, and who buggers of before the preso.  Sure, there’s always a good reason, but you’re wasting it.

Every holiday’s always too short, so if you’re going to commit to moving into the woods for the weekend, and then flogging yourself around the track, why not do it properly?

Take a day off work, turn up Friday to pick a sweet campsite, set up, kick back, catch up, check out the track and take part in what I reckon is the best bit.

Just hangin’ around.

If you’re new to this game, you’ll get a handle on what it’s about and meet some great people. If you’ve done it a few times before you’ll have a million mates to catch up with!

And you may not know it yet, but if you miss the Friday evening roller racing, you’ll spend the next 12 months hearing all about it from them that was there. There’s no better way to spend your time before the big one than pissing yourself laughing while your mates are sprinting against each other on the spot, trying for the high score!

If you’ve got the time to train, to enter, to prep your bike, to drive to the site – then you better have time to enjoy it properly.

Make time.

OK, so after the last couple of missives now you know why you’re there and what to wear, but where are you going to vogue between laps?

It’s far more important to have a good campsite than a good bike at these things. Face it, you’re gonna use one 4-6 times more than the other – and that’s just during race hours… not to mention the best bits – anticipation before and reflection after.

So the camp. Start with a chair. It is the single most important piece of un-bike gear that you will pack. The rule is if you bring a chair you can sit anywhere on any chair… because ultimately if there was a full round of kicking out of bums from chairs of owners, the dude on their arse on the ground would be the clown that didn’t bring a chair!

Next, the canvas room (or rooms). You need two. YOU need two. One is the big hang-out tent, or tarp, or luxury camper-van if you’re riding with James Packer. This one you share with the team, the WAGs (or HAGs) and the groupies that a great team will inevitably draw to itself (of course the microwave, TV and coffee machine might have something to do with that too). The other is somewhere to sleep, get changed, be shagged in (if you’re lucky) then escape to if it pisses down and rider #4 is fast-but-a-pain-in-da-arse. Think about where you pitch it. You don’t wanna be in the middle of the main walkway – and similarly do not  do what ASG did once and tie your tent off to a convenient bit of infrastructure – only to find at midnight that sleeping next to a generator driven light tower is taking the soothing sounds of the white noise generator to extreme levels! Then you need to piss in three corners of your hang-out tent (metaphysically speaking).

Bring three storage things. For YOUR things. Store nothing for others and be a bastard about lending stuff.

Bring an esky. Doesn’t need to be a huge one with everything in it, because you KNOW you’ll do at least one steak sandwich or pancakes, or (heaven help) lentil burger from the food dudes. No, the esky is to keep all your chow and drinks in. It’s your fuel dump. When you’re knackered at the end of a lap, this is where you go to refuel. You don’t wanna be dashing all over the tent, looking under your mates’ dirty knicks and banana peels for that box of muesli bars you think you left over there… Stash the beer in the bottom. If you’re riding properly you’ll need a few for Friday and perhaps two for Sunday.

Same with gear. Get yourself a $2.99 plastic tub from Kmart to toss your lights, spares, pump, etc in. Same principle. You know what you’ve brung, and you’ll be able to quickly find that spare battery at 3am in the middle of your double lap without having to wake every bugger up to find the keys to Nigel’s car, only to remember you’d tossed it in with your sleeping bag… Get all office-stationary-anal on your gear.

Tool box. Take enough for the jobs you’re comfortable with (the really tricky ones you sorted with savvy recruiting… you did recruit a mechanic onto the team, didn’t you?).  Keep an eye on it, and if it’s small enough, keep it in your Kmart box.

The final gear bag is your sleeping tent bag - with clothes, sleeping bag and mat, head torch, spare bog roll – and perhaps a small folding, hand tooled art deco display cabinet for your socks.

So there it is. The perfect camp. You’ve got you space laid out and you know where it all oughta go when you’re knackered and half cut after sniffing two post race beers.

And best, you’ve got even more reason to be there early on Friday to make sure it’s all sorted.

There’s an old adage that, as regards clothes, you should take EVERYTHING to a 24hr race in Canberra. You could. But you don’t need to.

You CAN do a whole 24hr race with one jersey and one pair of knicks. Mind you, you’ll need to take your own tent, cooking gear, chain rag and so forth – because you’ll be camping by yourself by 8pm, banished from the inner glow of the wind-up lantern, Mr Stinkypants!

You need more than a minimum – but not everything. If it’s not throwing down you only need a couple of pairs of knicks – it’s certainly fair game to wear one pair on the first lap, and then a couple of hours later on the second, so long as they stay on for the duration.

Night might demand a new set, and one certainly doesn’t pull an old pair back on – that would be wrong. The rule is that knicks that are a couple of hours old are fair, because they don’t become irreversibly skanky until you remove them from your body (you can slide them all the way to your shoes in the portaloo and they’re still good {unless there are puddles – portaloo puddles change everything}).

Jerseys, like knicks, can go a couple of laps, but unlike knicks can make an encore appearance. How so? Well, you’re not returning anything overly absorbent near to anything precious – and if there’s a little musk in the air it can work in your favour on the climb. No one’s going to wheel suck because the stank is generally about a bike length back. (Note: and this is important: this rule CANNOT be applied on social rides. Like using the bushman’s hanky at the café, this’ll see you on the outer quicker than a junior all hopped up on gel.)

Most importantly, never overdress at night. Take a Big Warm Thing instead. Your BWT will get you to transition and keep you warm far better than tights and a shell will while you’re standing around waiting for your arse-clown mate who double-flatted (see earlier column). Best is a jacket, ’cause you can warm up in it, then toss your BWT to your team mate in transition to take back to your pit. A blanket does as a BWT in a pinch, but try warming up with that over your shoulders and you might just get to the first aid tent before your lap instead of after.

Finally, Socks. Open slather. It is acceptable to change socks every lap, but we all know that there’s only one pair of truly awesome socks in your stash – and they can go around again and again and again.

Because there’s nothing more important than awesome socks.

No matter how far off the race is, it is worthwhile to ask your team five questions

1. Should we transition like a squad of marines?

This is something you need to get straight. Think for a minute. Would you rather bust your arse to stay in touch with that guy in front, only to be twiddling your thumbs at transition because your slack-arse mate was too slack-arse to be there on time – or watch that guy ride away, then giggle as HE’S sooking in transition because his buddy is late. If you’re going to bury yourself on the track, it’s worth asking yourselves if you’re going to do all you can in transition – where it’s only easy organisation, not muscle-power that makes a difference.

But before you answer that, ask yourself this…

2. Will we ride all night?

You don’t have to ride all night. Why would you ride all night? There are plenty of teams who are (statistically on entry numbers alone) likely to beat you, so why beat yourself up getting all anal and riding all night. Chill. Relax. – Or don’t. By all means ride all night. After all, that’s why you’re here isn’t it? You do rather need to know, as a team, what the plan is.

But before you answer that, ask yourself this…

3. Who’s the boss?

Someone oughta be the boss – and not necessarily that sucker you convinced to do all the lame paperwork and entry guff. Someone needs to be the psychological boss. The Arthur to your knights, the Jerry to your George, Elaine and Kramers, the Tony Abbott’s Speedos to the press gallery – your best team leader is one that is clearly worthy of following, but not so gauche as to demand it. The true team boss makes sure everyone is on the same page, so that it’s clear and known where chardonnay and lap times sit in the hierarchy of pit importance.

But before you answer that, ask yourself this…

4. Do you REALLY care?

You don’t have to. For 99.9% of the field, in 3 months it’ll be about the memory of a fun bit of track, or a great weekend – not about mentally hitting yourself with sticks about how fast you went or how badly you buggered up that line or what an arse-clown your team mate was for flatting. Remember, it’s not important – not like getting into Uni, or convincing that opposite sex member that you’re secretly Jake Gyllenhaal or Scarlett Johansson, or coming up with the right name so your kids don’t go through life called Logan or Citroen. It’s only a bike race.

But before you answer that, ask yourself this…

5. Is it important?

It might be. Perhaps you’re trying to prove something to yourself. Perhaps you get your jollies from whipping a team into shape, riding as hard as you can all weekend and going home knowing you did the best you could. Or perhaps you really are here just for the Friday night shenanigans. I can’t answer that for you, (despite this pair of awesome socks) – they can’t answer that at the rego tent, and that clown who blew past and pushed you into the bushes sure ain’t going to answer it. You gotta do that yourself.

1. 5 Questions to ask of the team HERE

2. What not to wear HERE

3. Camp it up HERE

4. Its about time HERE

Situated between the vibrant hubs of Kingston and Manuka in Canberra’s prestigious Inner South, East Hotel is a purpose-built 4.5 star apartment hotel and the ideal place to stay while you are in Canberra. East Hotel’s website is HERE

East Hotel have set up a special rate for competitors in the Kowalski Classic.

To access this rate, simply call 02 6295 6925 or email stay@easthotel.com.au and mention you are down for the Kowalski Classic. Alternatively, you can go to www.easthotel.com.au and use the “Make a Booking” link there and enter the promo code KOW

East features

• Centrally located in Kingston
• Close to canberra’s major attractions
• 24hr reception
• Fully equipped gym
• Spacious apartments & studios
• Fully equipped kitchens
• Undercover parking
• OX eatery
• Free-range newsagency
• Nespresso coffee machines
• Bikes available
• Awesome king size beds
• Installation art in lobby
• Brilliant conference & event facilities
• Specially appointed kids rooms

Snowy Hydro SouthCare is our nominated charity and volunteers will greet you as you arrive at the campground. Have your gold coins ready and contribute to making a difference in someone else’s life. GIVE GENEROUSLY AND OFTEN.

You can also donate online HERE.