Today is the kick off to our National Mountain Bike Race series. We Had 6 laps to do today, and of a fairly hard course. Tons of climbing and some single track that seemed to be a bit harder once your heart was high from the climbing that you had been doing. The field was stacked, with all of Canada's fastest, and some from the neighbors beside us at the start line all coming out to test the winter past of hard training. We had some serious rain on the Saturday night, which led us all to assume that we will be racing in the mud. When we showed up Sunday morning the course had somehow drained all the rain and was in impeccable condition. So dry tires it is.
I Had a front row call up,(based on UCI points) and that was nice because we only had a small start loop and then bamm! into the fun stuff. I started a bit conservative, I wanted to make sure that I would have some gas for the second half of the race. Going through on the first lap I was in around 10th'ish place. I had a small group of riders up the trail in front of me and many chasing hard from behind. I slowly tried to up my pace, or effort each lap, trying to pass at least one racer per lap. It doesn't always work out to one racer per lap, it maybe one lap with no moving up, then one lap with two racers passed. I cruised along most of the race kind of by myself, other racers were always in sight, just not super close. I rode in today for a 7th place finish, Happy and ready for next weekend, uh and, the 5 weekends after that.
On another note, passing lapped riders was kind of tight, I never like trying to make passes in the tough stuff, it increases the risk of both of us for something to go wrong. But because it was tight, some tight passes had to happen. And that always is tough on its own, if you look at it, you are riding along a trail at race pace, then to make a pass in single track you have to go from a nice fast trail to slow soft dirt with moss and sticks. Yay, and then to make the pass you have to up the effort. Yay again. Sometimes some of the racers that are getting lapped understand the situation and sometimes they don't. And hopefully they realize that we are racing too, and sometimes we "really" need to come by. Anyways just a quick note to no situation in particular, I just wanted to put it out there.
See you in Tremblant.
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