Noosa Roads Crew's (bunch road rides)

Noosa Road Crew

The Noosa road crew rides leave from the Homemaker Centre Mary St Noosaville at 6.00am every day except Saturday (Meet at Noosa fire station). These rides are not club or shop rides just the local crew out, so there is no insurance cover. Any body is welcome to come along, but you will need to have experience in bunch riding & an understanding of bunch etiquette, the crew normally averages about 30-32 km/hr. 

Noosa Raw Crew

The Noosa Raw crew rides leave from Raw Energy on Gympie Tce. at 6am every day. These rides are not club or shop rides just the local crew out, so there is no insurance cover. Any body is welcome to come along, but you will need to have experience in bunch riding & an understanding of bunch etiquette, the crew normally averages about 25-30 km/hr.

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New Zealand Roadies love the Sunshine Coast

Spinning in “Sunshine Land”

The depths of winter are never a good time for the road cyclist. Unless you are one of ‘special’ sort of people that can spin away on an indoor trainer for Km after Km, the winter months can play havoc with cycle fitness. But there is an answer... This year, a ‘landmark’ (4-0 – gulp!) birthday gave me the perfect excuse to tee up a week of ideal cycling conditions over on the Sunshine Coast (or “Sunshine Land” as our son, Harry likes to call it). About an hour north of Brisbane, the strip of coastline between Maroochydore and Noosa is a mecca for surfers – but its also pretty ideal for winter-avoiding cyclists. This is apparent to anyone who has read the caffeine culture series of We were based at a resort called Twin Waters near Mudjimba– a small town about 10 mins up the road from Maroochydore.

Having taken a bike to Oz before (for the Tour Down Under), I knew that its not a problem – unless you have a Grade A hire car and a wife and son also with you...So I researched options for bike hire and luckily for me found Roger from Noosa Bike Hire (http://www.bikeon.com.au/). He has a full range of Treks to suit all sizes and conveniently for me offered a bike drop off/pick up service. Hire of the bike comes with a spare saddle bag with tube, a pump, helmet, lock and a bike computer – even pedals. So all I had to bring were my shoes! The Trek 50cm 1.7 I had for the week was superb. Nice relaxed geometry – perfect for the cruising type rides I had planned.

My bike for the week – Trek 1.7

I had only planned to ride a few hours each morning – leaving afternoons free for family stuff (this was NOT exclusively a cycle holiday after all!). So, with my trusty 1:250,000 map, went about planning my routes for each day. This area of the sunshine coast is actually pretty hilly – 20Km inland and the hinterland gets pretty steep – around 15% climbs to hills some 400m+ - very similar to our Port Hills. There is of course the beautiful coastal strip heading south from Noosa (the David Low Way) – and then there are plenty of rolling terrain options as you wind you way inland for various loops around the sugar cane fields. My route for each day can be seen in the map below, but suffice to say, each day I had plenty of variety and stunning scenery to put that permanent grin on the face....

Ah, winter in Queensland cruising the David Low Way   Grinding up to Montville.....  Then descending from Montville.....With Roger (Noosa Bike Hire)

Best of all is the weather – winter time on the sunshine coast is just about perfect (as far as I am concerned – being a ‘pom’ I don’t like it too hot anyway!). It was strictly bibshorts and short sleeve cycle top all week – with just a Gilet to keep the wind off for the first hour of the ride. Lovely. It wasn’t about putting in miles and miles of training – simply enjoying riding your bike - and knowing that your mates weren’t doing the same back home! My K count for the week wasn’t massive – just over 350Km – but they were quality K’s – in that they weren’t on the bl**dy indoor trainer in the garage! So if you are looking to escape the Christchurch winter next year and want to encompass some cycling I can thoroughly recommend the sunshine coast for its challenging and glorious rides.

My thanks again to Roger for organising my bike for the week. See you again next year mate.....

Here’s how my week panned out- all routes starting from the Twin Waters resort.

A visiting roadie view on the Noosa Road Crew

Rob Marcus  Va Va Veteran from London who has been riding with the Noosa Crew.  He has a blog site about his cycling adventures and has recently updated it to include a piece about riding with the local Noosa Crew.

Australia is a mustering point for some of the animal kingdom’s most accomplished endurance athletes; Eastern Curlews from Russia and Bar-Tailed Godwits from the Arctic Tundra to name but two. And just a tiny bit up the coast from Moreton Bay there’s Noosa Bike Shop in Mary Street, Noosaville. Here, for the ten minutes before 6am every morning (not Saturdays, when the Police HQ is the meeting point), gather some similarly capable athletes – most of them astride either carbon creations of the very latest design or authentic 1970′s steel, and many of them boasting credentials that might turn a curlew’s beak the wrong way up.

Over there in the blue is Ben Kersten; he won a gold medal in the kilometre at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The chap on the Colnago chatting to the guy on the Trek, that’s Will Van Zetter talking to Jim Thompson, both of them national veteran road-race champions, now in their sixties. That guy on the fixed over there, that’s Ron Boyle, a medallist at the Montreal Olympics of 1976. Jez Peterson, once a rather handy downhill MTB expert is here too, and a few guys behind him is current world-class domestique Matt Wilson, fully dressed up in his Garmin Cervelo colourscheme although for 2012 he’s off to Green Edge. (He later asks me if I want to hand back my rental bike to Bike On, and buy his ‘one careful owner S3′ off of him. It’s a few sizes too big for me.). A smattering of world class triathletes and Ironmen have also turned out, which is not unusual. There’s Dmitri Simons, Australian Olympic triathlete, and the professional triathlete husband and wife duo the Grainger’s. Apparently brothers Brownlee were here a couple of weeks back, when only local physio Duncan Crosby could stay on their wheel.

Now, perhaps there are other places in the world where a cyclist can turn up unannounced any day of the week and be welcomed onto a fast or slow ride of one or two hours in sunny twenty degrees heat, but I don’t know them. And I’m here, picking a fast ride out of the western end of town and into the Cooroy mountains. For a Londoner, it is extremely odd to be picking the thinnest short-sleeved jersey out of the suitcase on the cusp of December, and to be ordering tea and cake at 8am having put a sunny 70km under the wheels, but hey I’m not grumbling – indeed two weeks in and I’m getting the measure of things, and of the unique appeal of sub-tropical, rarely too hot and rarely too cold Noosa, and why it’s home to around 250 ex-Olympians. Monday is the ‘easy’ day, short in distance and slightly short of being a true recovery ride but suitable for any half-decent cyclist. Tuesday is race-pace, no question. And hilly. Apply only if you are strong, lactic-tolerant and aerobically capable – if you are going to get dropped then today is the day it could well happen. Wednesday is a lovely ride, longer and a few important notches less intense than Tuesday and taking in some beautifully green and rolling terrain. Living 20km out of town I’m now confident enough to leave the car at ‘home’ and ride to the start; so Wednesday’s can easily put over four hours into my diary. Thursday’s are my day off of the bike, but apparently they are short and quick, a flat version of Saturday which hugs the rolling road beside the South Pacific Ocean, a road from Noosa Junction to Coolum that is labelled the David Low Way. Fridays are unremarkable, a bit like Monday, while Sunday is a grander version of Wednesday and so my favourite of the week.

It all sounds idyllic cycling and in some senses it is: there are plentiful cycle lanes and the road surfaces generally range from good to brilliant, around the standards of the French alps. Traffic volumes are not high either, so why isn’t this heaven on cycling earth? Well, first up there aren’t that many roads! Queensland Australia has what it needs for motorised traffic and not much more…if you want quiet lanes that wind their way up and around the countryside look elsewhere. Secondly, well, I’m still working on secondly – the weather is just so kind to early morning cycling that the other deficiencies struggle to take root. Perhaps you should come and make your own mind up – despite the calibre of riders that will be around you, a medal is not a condition of entry although if you want to be one of the dramatis personae I can’t deny that it might help.