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@Dammit
Singapore Open Enduro: I raced this over the weekend just gone, this is something of a race report.
Singapore has three legal areas where one can ride a mountain bike on the main island - there's a further area on Pulau Ubin, an island to the North East of Singapore, between Singapore and Malaysia.
On the main island those areas are Kent Ridge, Dairy Farm Nature Park (often referred to as Bukit Timah) and Chestnut bike park. These areas are fairly close together, and the two day Enduro had a qualifying prologue stage at Kent Ridge on the Saturday followed by five stages spread over both Bukit Timah and Chestnut on the Sunday.
I've been riding in Bukit Timah/Dairy Farm every weekend since I got here, prior to signing up to the Enduro I'd never ridden in Kent Ridge and I'd ridden Chestnut once.
With a limited amount of time available (and no car, meaning I have to ride to every location which typically takes around three hours plus riding time at the destination) I decided to do some laps of Kent Ridge as that would define the start time for the main race, and here in Singapore the thunder storms tend to roll in from mid-morning, so an early race time might be very beneficial.
I thought I'd basically YOLO the three stages in Chestnut, which was sub-optimal but I had to work with what I had.
Work had a global wellness day on the Friday so I went and did some final laps of Kent Ridge, which were also the first I'd done there on my Enduro bike. I was a lot happier with the technical elements (Singapore is pretty flat, but it's certainly not short of technical riding), but I couldn't do a huge number of laps because a) fitness, b) 35 degrees at 85% humidity and c) three hour round trip ride to get there and back, and finally d) racing the following day. But, whatever -I was happy that I knew the prologue course now and could ride all of it.
The following day I rolled out of bed at 6am, rode to the course starting point at Blue Balls Bike Cafe, picked up my timing chip and did a practice lap.
I lined up as it started raining pretty heavily and my qualifying lap reflected not so much the difficulty presented by the rain on the roots and rocks, but more my fear that they'd be slippery - I had three foot down moments and my qualifying run was 30 seconds slower than my (not pushing) practice. Oh well.
I rode home, had a shower and ate All The Food.
I also booked a bike-taxi for the following day as I'd need to leave at 5:30am to ride to the course, and I didn't want to. This was a much better way to start the day I felt, when I turned up fresh to the start - this time at Unsprung bike shop.
The race was fun, complete with the thing in my head that makes me take sections faster "because race" than I would if I was riding normally, and I went through the seven drops section at a speed which was largely but not completely in control - one guy went though here with incredible style at around the speed of sound, later video would reveal.
The two stages in Bukit Timah I was pretty happy with, and riding the transfer to Chestnut I felt things were going well.
Chestnut was almost totally unknown to me, whilst I'd ridden the trails there once before I had no mental map of where the features were or even where the trails went, so it was interesting to be tackling the three stages at speed whilst evaluating what I was about to hit next.
I went the wrong way on stage four, which cost me a fairly big chunk of time - the course tape was above head height to allow for walkers to go down a path, and I'd simply missed it when looking for the obvious route. Entirely my own fault, and this probably dropped me around 20 places when I had a look at the times.
Huge value of these three stages in presenting them to me as different, technical and fun trails that I'd not really made any effort to ride before - I'll definitely be adding these to my standard weekend riding.
Finishing, I was pretty blown, I could keep the pedals turning but there was nothing left in the tank. I got to Blue Cafe, had some lunch and hosed the majority off the mud off the bike before riding home along the Green Corridor - an old railway track that winds through the centre-west of the island, before finishing a short ride from the CBD and then onto the East Coast Park, which got me to Katong/shower/All The Food v3.
I ended up 64th of ~125 racers, and had had a great time finding new trails to ride in future. I'll definitely race this again in '24, and next time I'll try not to go the wrong way.
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