Before this week’s big news, the privilege of riding the trails at Wairoa Gorge was something that had to be battled for once a year. If you were one of the select builders who worked on their development, maybe a bit more than that. Securing an entry to the Dodzy Memorial Enduro was the only option for the rest of us, and the tension when the moment came to log in and register was even harder than negotiating the technical trails once you got there… if you were lucky.

For the fourth running earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to be part of the media scrum covering the event. As anyone who has ridden there will know, you need to be prepared both physically and mentally for the weekend, because everyone comes away with something broken, on body or bike, and always with a story to tell. Going in underdone will bite you, every time.

An old man’s injury sustained just by getting out of bed and compounded by a crash a month before meant that my shoulder was barely working, with numbness rendering my right arm just about useless even on the road bike. But no fucking way was I missing out on riding the Gorge. Our crew arrived two days before the official festivities kicked off, we’d have the whole place to ourselves and while we were ‘working’, it seemed more like a holiday at a theme park. The theme being fast, steep, technical trails.

My shoulder was holding up pretty well, or maybe the pain was masked by the adrenaline and euphoria. Numbness was mostly in the frontal lobe, blocking out anything that didn’t involve thinking about the singletrack directly in front of my wheels. But when you’re trying to keep pace with someone as fast as Wyn Masters, well it’s not going to end well for a mere mortal. What we were on couldn’t really be described as a trail, in fact it took Wyn a few minutes to locate the entry to the fall-line that he passed off as “a little bit steep”. About a minute later I was airborne, and not in a good way, and about to hug a tree, not in the hippy way that I would have preferred either. A few minutes of sucking in the air that had just been expelled, another couple of trips off the side of the trail, and what felt like some broken ribs meant the rest of my day was spent gingerly negotiating my way to the bottom of the hill.

The thing with ribs is, they only hurt when you laugh, or breathe. I couldn’t avoid either, and by the time I lowered myself into the bunk that night I wasn’t really enjoying myself, despite the copious liquid painkillers I’d generously self-medicated with. The bigger problem though was the existing shoulder injury, which was compounded by the ribs. Feeling like a true invalid, I summoned the Rodfather to seek out a tennis ball or something similar so I could roll the tightness from my back and attempt some pain-free sleep.

After ten minutes or so he re-emerged and handed me a strange-looking item. Explaining that there were no tennis balls or the like to be found, he broke down the ingredients: a rock from the driveway, a couple of pieces of egg carton, and the binding agent of Glad Wrap. While not really being able to roll it around my back, it was more than good enough to put pressure on the tight spots and relieve some of the pain. The ingenuity, while on a scale that won’t win any Nobel Prizes for Science, meant that I could ride again the next day, and for that I’ll be forever in debt to a piece of rock, and some good old Kiwi ingenuity.

*The Gorge kept its evil curse intact the next day; while I was shooting photos I got stung above the eye by a wasp, resulting in a panicked ride to the bottom and a face that had to be explained to everyone I spoke to the rest of the weekend. Still, I can’t wait to get back to that place!