last time at the rollercoaster in canberra i met a lady with her daughter (pushing her & her daughter’s bike up the hill as every good mum would). nicole and i started talking and it turned out her daughter was the same age as natalie. there are not that many girls riding mountain bike (i mean serious mountain bike) so we agreed we’d get the two girls together for a ride.
last weekend we met up for a little family ride and the girls had a great time. the club had a gravity enduro race coming up this weekend …
natalie really wanted to race for a while and we knew this one would be a small event with friendly people and a few kids.
nat’s first ever race! the zimtstern jersey (oma sent that) has been waiting to be taken out for a proper race.
milly just after the start ramp. this is a lot steeper than it looks and goes straight into a number of berms. nicole followed the two girls; actually she mostly followed natalie because milly was on a rampage and took the lead immediately.
natalie chose a slightly different line: all lines are good (as long as they are fast). nicole did a great job coaching natalie down the hill and natalie had a lot of fun with her; more, i must admit, than she would probably have had with me.
as we were waiting down at the finish line on run 2 (yes they had done one complete run already by then!) we suddenly heard over the radio that one little girl with a yellow commencal had gone over the bars and was walking down the trail with our friend. not good (read: full blown parent panic!) – and while we were trying to find out more we got news of another little girl with a hurt arm. milly showed up quickly and it did not look good at all. her bike had fallen on her arm and it really hurt.
so we got the discovery in and started to ride up the fireroad to collect natalie and nicole. we found them just a few hundred meters up the road – and nat was smiling (huge parent relief).
poor milly on the other hand may have broken her arm – we hope not!
natalie was ok, just a few scratches and a bit of a sprained wrist. but there was one casualty:
rest in piece little helmet, you have done your job. better a hole in the helmet than a hole in the head. and most importantly: nat really went well today (nicole said she was flying down the trail on the second run) and it does not seem like she will let this stop her.
great stuff, the world needs more fearless girls!
btw: the trails were far from easy today, we had a lot of nasty not-so-little drops that were tough with the 650b wheels and would have been downright scary on the small 24″ wheels.
ps: we were doing overall 19km and 700m ascent. all in an afternoon’s work.