Posted Aug 13th 2007, 2:32pm

TRANS ROCKIES BLOG - Day Three / Stage ONE

Follow Isporty founder Chris Ward and team-mate Bill Gilbert's daily blog as they participate in this years 7-day Trans Rockies mountain-bike race. It's Day Three, and more importantly, Stage One ...

Bill's Blog ..

To say that I was anxious about the Stage would have been an understatement. We had whipped ourselves into a frenzy of panic by the time the start had come along.

The first stage was 33km; thats it, 33km. I mean how bad could it be? There was one major climb of about 7km and then 'bike hike' for 2.2km, then a switch back descent and the single-track for 13km.

Well it took us 3h 40m - unbelievable! It took us one hour to do the 2.2 bike hike alone - the fact that it was up a 45 degree slope complicated things.

The switch back descent was just a nightmare - it was all on single-track (I now fully understand the term single-track) covered with roots and rocks. One side was the mountain, the other a big drop which, if you went over, your descent time improved dramatically .. until you crashed into a tree.

Overall I guess we wanted to make sure we didn't make fools of ourselves. On the first ascent, we passed a lot of people. The descent we were useless, and I was saved by a tree on more than one occasion, but it seemed everyone had a problem with the descent.

I saw one guy go over the edge saved only by the fact a tree hit him in the face.

Overall feel pretty good. Chris was faster on the descent, but crashed almost as much. Oh yeah, and we beat the guys who were laughing at my bike the other night!

But we feel good, ready for the next day, ascents and dirt roads - the roadie training kicks in, the descents still need a lot of work - still way too scary and we are only going half the speed of the old hands.

Chris's Blog ..

First day was tough and parts of it very scary. Didn't seem to be just us having problems though - mentally and physically. Even old hands seemed to think it was a 'technical' stage and that things should get less scary from now .. here's hoping!

The day didn't exhust me though and I think the longer days coming should be better for me and Bill as we have plenty of indurance training.

Last night we started the institutalised process of queuing for the toilet, showers, water, bike wash and finally the longest queue - for food.

Managed to get a few hours off in a nice cafe to bring some normality to life.

There'll be less and less of that each day as the Stages get longer ..