Pete Bigaila kicks ass at the JetBlack 24hr race
The large calendar fridge magnets as prizes were a bit underwhelming.
Now I don’t know about you but I like to divide my day up into sleep-time and not-sleep-time. The ratio can vary somewhat but I usually get 7-8 hours of sleep each day so I guess I’m a bit of a traditionalist that way and I’m OK with this. However Bushrangers member Pete Bigaila probably looks at this 8 hours of beautiful sleep I have and thinks “Sleep Schmeep – you could be riding your bike!”.
Yup that’s right, Pete likes to ride his bike for the whole 24 hours, it’s his thing. He trains for these races by doing daily 100km rides and he even does a few of these at 2am in the morning because hey, why not! It’s not like he should be in bed or anything.
Last year he got his rainbow jersey (World Champ) doing it in NZ and he also did the Merida 24hr at Hiddenvale and now he has gone off and done it again down at the JetBlack 24hr in NSW, winning his age group and coming 3rd overall – results here.
This race was at the Awaba trails and according to Pete it was a hard course, very Parklands-esque apparently. So picture that – racing around Parklands, all day and then all night, eating and drinking on the bike (not sure about the peeing and pooping – that sounds like an important question for Pete when you see him next). The really worse part is that you’d miss Home and Away and someone would probably spoil it for you before you got home to watch the recording – a true sufferfest indeed!
Now let me get out my abacus and crunch some numbers. So Pete did 28 laps of the course and each lap was around 10km and had 205 of climbing. That means Pete rode for 24 hrs straight on gnarly trails for 280km and climbed 5949m. Yeah, #*@% that, I’m staying in bed.
But seriously, nice work Pete! Amazing effort! You’d think this cheap-ass club would give you a shirt or something.
Michael “ZZZzzzzzz” Johns
Club Secretary
Ride map and elevation