Climb every mountain

SIMON HENDERY* battled a dicey bike, lack of fitness and razorback hills to take on the biggest mountain-bike ride in the Southern Hemisphere.

At 10pm on a balmy Friday, Mike Gane is in the shed at the back of his Nelson home, lamenting the state of the rented mountain bike I've brought down from Auckland.

"Have you paid them yet?" the Stoke cycle-shop owner and part-time event organiser tut-tuts.

The bike's brake cables are frayed, the back pads aren't making contact with the rim, and - in defiance of safety regulations - someone has reversed the standard front/back lever set-up.

As Gane tinkers and repairs, I am forced to confess that I did, indeed, pay the rental people when I picked up the bike that morning.

"Ask for your money back," Gane demands.

He is a stickler for safety - a requirement for someone who organises mass mountainbike rides across potentially treacherous terrain. And, as one of the 1237 riders entered in his Rainbow Rage ride the following day, I am strongly disposed to take him seriously.

Held every March, the Rainbow has grown in a few years to become the largest single-start mountain-biking event in the Southern Hemisphere. The ride starts at Rainbow Station, near St Arnaud (103km southwest of Nelson) and follows a spectacular high-country gravel road route to Hanmer Springs - a 106km journey.

After fixing my brakes, Gane says the bike's front shocks and the state of its gears also leave a lot to be desired. But then so does the state of its rider, so Gane shifts his focus to readying me to survive the following day's cycling ordeal. The one-day event is no walk in the park, and despite being directed to the ride's website and its instructions for participants, I have arrived in Nelson shamefully ill-equipped and unprepared.

Gane rummages around the house, gathering together a few essentials I will need to survive the event: a backpack water system, PowerBars and other energy foods, a water-repellent top to replace the hypothermia-inducing cotton T-shirt I had intended wearing, and a survival blanket.

It has been at least a couple of years since I last climbed on to a mountain bike, and I've certainly never ridden one anywhere near the distance of the Rainbow route. As we pack my newly borrowed gear, Gane dispenses useful advice, including: "Your energy levels will go up and down but it's important not to stop for a long rest when you're tired - that's when cramp can set in."

Aside from ensuring my survival the next day, Gane has other last-minute race-organising issues to worry about this Friday night. The PowerBar-sponsored event looks like being without its sponsor's product this year. Each rider is supposed to receive a PowerBar at the start, but a shipment of bars is lost in transit and a deeply upset and apologetic PowerBar man has been on the phone.

"I almost feel sorry for him. It's not his fault," says an unflappable Gane who, with the help of wife Liz, has organised too many of these type of events to be rattled by such last-minute hitches.

This is Gane's seventh Rainbow, and the fourth with more than 1000 entrants. The first Rainbow Rage, held in 1996, attracted just 66 riders, but the concept proved a hit with the mountain-biking community and numbers swelled to a record 1600 last year.

T HE Gane household stirs at 4 o'clock the next morning and by 6am we are at the Rainbow start line. The pre-dawn wind feels depressingly strong and is bitterly cold. But I'm assured it is blowing in the right direction, meaning a tail wind for most of the ride.

As the 9am start approaches the sun comes out, the wind drops and a surreal scene unfolds. In this paddock in the middle of nowhere, 1200 cyclists form a sea of lycra and helmets, stretching back several hundred metres.

The serious riders, who will take less than four hours to complete the 106km trip, jostle for the best starting positions.

Although the event is promoted as "a ride, not a race", naturally the serious competitors are after line-honour glory. Front-end jostling prompts a warning from Gane not to cross the line or move outside the start boundary. "No fear, no favour," he tells one of the regular competitors.

Suddenly the ride begins and pre-start yabbering in the pack is replaced by the whirr of 2400 rubber tyres on asphalt. The first few kilometres of the ride is over tarseal but the track soon degenerates into a gravel four-wheel-drive road which was originally a stock-driving route.

The tight throng of riders quickly breaks up into smaller groups as we find our individual pace. Within minutes I realise saddle sores are going to be my biggest problem - each jarring connection between bike seat and bum brings more pain.

Still, the scenery is spectacular, and between admiring the view, concentrating on steering a safe path around other cyclists, potholes, ruts and over fords, little time is left to wallow in the pain. Conversations with other riders become shorter as the morning goes on, and mainly focus on guesstimates of how far we've travelled. By 12.30pm the sun is beating down and I feel completely sapped of energy.

The slightest incline uphill is an excuse to dismount and walk. Every downhill run is a mix of weary relief and fear that in my groggy state I'll career head-first over the handlebars after an encounter with a particularly ill-placed pothole.

The trail turns into the wind and a violent gust thrusts dust into my eyes. Now I get a sense of what the ride must have been like last year, when participants were cursed with a headwind most of the way. As Gane tells me later, it was so severe he had at least one rider collapse sobbing in his arms at the end of the ride, whimpering, "That's the hardest thing I've ever done".

In fact, Gane attributes the 400-rider drop in registrations to that headwind which made the ride a nightmare of endurance.

Meanwhile, in my unfit state, I'm finding it enough of a struggle in this year's near-perfect conditions. Rounding one corner brings the formidable sight of the long, winding track up to 1372m-high Island Saddle, 60km into the ride. Although the hill is exhausting, even to look at, the psychological magnet of a drink-stop spurs me on. Once at the summit there's another significant milestone - the run is predominantly downhill all the way to the finish.

Even though there is still ample pain to be endured over the next 46km - the bruises from the bone-jarring corrugations on the track will linger for several days - gradually my spirits lift. Before I know it I've reached Jack's Pass and all that remains is an adrenalin-pumping 5km downhill plunge to the Hanmer Springs Domain and the finish line.

Gane plonks a bottle of beer in my unsteady hand as the race clock strikes 7 hours 13 minutes giving me 1050th place out of 1162 finishers.

My ride has been uneventful compared with some. There was the bloke whose tyre blew out when he still had 18km left to ride. Determined to finish, he carried his bike over the rest of the course.

At prizegiving the tale is told of another rider whose knee seized up at the halfway mark. Also suffering an unhealthy determination to complete the distance, he duct-taped his foot to the peddle and struggled on. The oldest participant was 80-year-old Allan Dean, who took only an hour and a quarter longer than me to finish the ride in a creditable 8 hours 31 minutes.

Then, at the business end of the event, first across the line was professional mountain-biker Tim Vincent, who took just 3 hours 29 minutes. A fast drive over the course in a four-wheel-drive takes at least two and a-half hours.

Vincent is certainly a pro. After a short rest at the finish, he and a few others from the leading bunch got back on their bikes and rode the same route back to the start, picked up their cars and drove home, while the rest of us were still slogging the other way.

Personally I remember narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with an irrepressible bunch at about the 70km mark. At the time I thought I must be hallucinating.

* Simon Hendery travelled to Nelson courtesy Origin Pacific, a Rainbow Rage sponsor