The cottage

Catherine and I went to her cottage by Ottawa for the middle of the week, and had a great time hanging out with her parents. Duncan and I built a shed, and last week when Dan and Brian were there we built a sweet bike jump off a dock into the lake. It was tons of fun.

Mount Sainte Anne World Cup

Hi All. Well the Mount Sainte Anne World cup was pretty crazy. It was fairly difficult conditions, with rain in the womens race in the morning (which my house mate Catharine Pendrel won!!!), and then drying up during the men's race. This meant that there was mud drug by our tires out onto previously clean surfaces, and lots of slick roots in the woods.

It made for fun riding, however the start of the race was a bit of a gongshow, as the orginizers decided we didn't need a start lap, and sent all 105 of us directly into a piece of singletrack where we stood around for 3min or so waiting to ride our bikes. Finally about 1/2 way throught the first lap, and 5min down, we were able to race. I rode fairly well, not my best race of the year, but still decent. I had good legs, but had crashed the day before riding way too fast over a mud coated rock on a corner, and banged up my knee. It bothered me a bit whenever i had to walk (not run) my bike, so that was a bit of a bumber. I still had a decent race to finish one lap down in 56th place, 7th Canadian.

I got a sweet new prototype Xprezo at this World cup, it is bright green, with internal cable routing, 4 inches of travel, and lighter tubing and material removed in various places.

What I do with my spare time

As a rich bike racer, I decided to build a tower with my recent race winnings. You can see that I race for the money. No glue involved.

Nationals

This year nationals were held in St Felecien, Quebec, which is about 400km north of Quebec city.

The venue has amazing trails, and a very well designed race course, with 6 over-unders so a spectator can stand in one area and see racers maybe 8x/lap. The course also has a bermed up bike park section and a nice mix of technical singletrack climbing and descending.

I got plate #3, because at the start of nationals I was ranked 3rd overall in the country for UCI points! I had a good start, and was 4th coming through the start loop. I let a few people by and settled in at about 7th. I rode there for lap 1, about 30sec behind the leaders. On lap 2 the leaders opened up the gap a lot more, and I was riding with Jullien Fillion from Quebec. It was great to ride with him, because it really kept me on my game and racing really hard. We would pass each other and try to drop the other lots of times, and on lap 3 he got a bit of a gap on me. However there was a long rooty climb that I was able to catch him on, and then I drafted for a double track section. On lap 4 I attacked him and was feeling really good, and I rode super hard and got a decent gap. By the last lap I was cramping pretty badly and had to dig super deep to stay ahead. For the last descent I was so out of it I was seeing lights, I rode it super sketchily, and hit every rock, root, and tree out there before slowing down and focusing on just finishing the race. I rolled into the line in 6th place, very happy with the way I rode.

Many thanks to everyone for cheering, and to my parents, the Viponds, and XPREZO for support.

Bromont Canada Cup July 6

Just a quick note here. . . For the Canada Cup here, it rained all week, enough that the ground was super saturated, and then on Sunday (race day) the sun came out turning 80% of the trail into 5 to 10cm thick peanut butter mud. And not peanut butter that has sat out in the sun either, but like it is after you pull it out of you fridge.

Within the first 300m of the course we were already pushing our bikes. I figure i pedaled enough to cover an extra 2 km, it just all went into spinning in the mud. I had a decent race to finish 3rd, so the Xprezo team was happy.

I race nationals next weekend in Saint Felecien Quebec, so that should be a good one.

Edmonton Canada Cup June 13

So I had a good race on the weekend at Edmonton. We were racing in the river valley smack in downtown, so it was a pretty cool venue with lots of spectators. The course was relatively flat, but lots of fun, with tons of singletrack and most of it was fairly rooty and technical.

I had a good start and never rode in worse than 2nd for the whole race. Tim Heemskerk led for part of the first lap, and then there was this technical root drop into an off camber corner that I thought he might run, and I was planning on riding, so I got in front for it and rode it. Tim ran it and that meant that I got about a 8sec gap on everyone behind me. This was actually a decisive move, as only Tim was able to catch back up and we rode lap 2, 3, and part of 4 together. There were times where we would attack each other to get into a section first or try and drop the other. Probably these efforts weren't the smartest thing, because by lap 4 even though I had dropped Tim, Watson caught me and attacked me super hard on the start climb. I kind of tried to go with him, but couldn't and just rode as smooth and steady as possible to finish 2nd, 1min back and 1min ahead of Tim.

It was a pretty fun race, and I am happy with my consistency and improvement in results compared to last year. I am now ranked 2nd overall in the Canada Cup Series.

Many thanks to the support of Terry and Dianne Jones for the great accommodations and meals during the week. Also thanks to my sponsor XPREZO for making great mountain bikes. Check out more Xprezo news at http://www.xprezo.ca/

Race the Ranch June 6

So I did the BC cup #2, only because it was 800m from my door. Yep, that's right, I got off my couch 30min before the start and rolled up to the line. It was pretty sweet not to have to travel at all.

The race was 10deg cooler than last year, which means it was only 32deg! I made sure I went hard at the start, because last year I got caught up in a dust cloud and did a somersault into the sage brush. I lead the first lap by about 10sec, and then just kept opening up the gap from there. My dualie was awesome on this course, as there are tons of little bumps from pedaling, almost like washboard from cars. There were some pretty fun sections that I had helped build, one was this near vertical run down into a compression that then sling shot you right back up the hill on the other side. If you hit it too hard your legs would collapse and you'd get all squirrely on the bike. I do believe there were a few crashes there on the weekend.

The course did get super rutted out and dusty. It is just so dry there and a very silty soil. The course actually became a lot more technical as the race went on. It was awesome having some of the local crowd out to cheer us on. Mike, Aaron, and Pete all had me laughing so hard I almost fell off my bike while racing with some of their antics.

Anyway I had a good race here and ended up getting my first win of the season. This is a photo of Evan, who was 2nd. I just wanted to show all the dust.