This blog hasn't been too busy lately and neither has the rider. I haven't ridden much since October, just here and there for the fun of it. The 2nd half of this year was pretty crummy for cycling....bad weather, no time, no motivation. I finally decided to stop beating myself up for it and just take time off the bike. As the new year approaches I am beginning to get the itch to ride again and I'm starting to think about next season. Nothing really solid planned out but I think Solo 24 hour races will take a back seat to mix of 100 milers and "regular" races. I really want to focus on my speed this year and opposed to getting in only long rides. I want to crank out super fast laps (and maybe turn a lap or two faster than Dave) so that is what I am going to focus on. I still love the long rides, but those will only come on the weekends...now I can focus on shorter (ie. 90 mins) rides during the week to work on speed. That's the plan anyways. I've been known to change my mind on occasion.

24 Hour World Solo's

It has been a few weeks since the World Solo Championships. It has taken me that long to digest what happened. He is a recap:

Thursday: Leave around 8am and drive for 12 hours with the kids (age 5 & 7). Luckily we have a DVD player in there and they are extremely well behaved. We stop somewhere in Kentucky for the night. The drive through Tennessee and Kentucky was quite enjoyable.

Friday: Arrive in Conyers, Georgia around 1pm. Check-in to the La Quinta motel. I call my brother (who is racing as well....he's from Arizona) and tell him where we are and he says it is pronounced "La Keeeenta"....I say whatever...I am Canadian and can say it how I please! We go over to the race site and get our pits set up. Talk to Hendershot for bit and see the Trek guys as well as the other major players. It is going to be exciting. Go to the riders meeting and hear the same story we always do. Some chuckles around the "no collusion" rule....there goes my plan to shadow Eatough for the whole race! :-) We head over to Ruby Tuesdays for dinner which was a mistake (mistake #1). Felt sick the rest of the night and have countless trips to the washroom.

Saturday Morning: Wake up in the morning with a migraine headache. Only brought 1 migraine pill with me and fuss over using it or not. Decided not to (2nd mistake). We head over to Walmart to pick up last minute items and I take a few more trips to their washroom. This isn't good. Get back to our pits and got interviewed by the people doing the 24-Solo documentary about Chris Eatough. I sure hope it makes the movie (I was filmed a few times on course as well).

Saturday Noon: The washroom breaks have subsided thankfully but the headache is still there. How much Ibuprofen can I take at a time? Call up has taken place and I am in the top third of the group to start the Le Mans run. I go pretty hard as I don't want to be last. Things go well until about 3/4 of the way through and I start having trouble. Shouldn't have gone out so hard (mistake #3). I'm not last though (far from it). I hop on the Asylum 29er and head out. Everybody is hammering but I am hanging on. The first half of the course is good singletrack but very bumpy. We head out to the 2nd half of the course....the rocky area. Literally riding on sheets of rock that have little mini pot holes everywhere. It is tough going and keeping momentum is a challenge. Riding along and come to a steep downhill. I see a skull and cross bones....must be a tough drop off but it isn't too bad. After that head straight back up a very steep, incredibly bumpy stretch. I make it about 3/4 of the way up and walk the rest of it. The rest of the lap is pretty uneventful but my time is dismal.

Saturday night - I've been lapped multiple times by the leaders as I mount my light on the bike for the first night lap. My brother and I decide to ride together and it turns out to be a good thing. Half way through the lap (where we pass by close to the pits) his light burns out and my light is almost out. Our 3 hour batteries were lasting 40 mins. We each grab another battery and finish the lap. We put in fresh batteries for our next night lap and sure enough halfway through the lap the lights are out. We head back to the pits....no more batteries left for me. I guess I need a new lighting system (mistake #4). My brother grabs a back up system he brought and finishes the lap. Riding the remainder of the night would be futile so we head back to the hotel for the night.

Sunday Morning: Up at 6am and head back down to the pits. I saddle up...it is a little dark but within about 15 mins it is light enough for no lights (I didn't have one anyways). The race has now come down to my brother and I. He is technically a half lap ahead of me. I got started in the morning first to finish my half lap and then did another lap. He is in the pits. We are tied. I wonder if he will do 1 or 2 more laps. I head out right away and finish my lap just after 11am but hold on to my baton just in case I need to do another lap....I had the energy but wanted to see the winners come across. I go back to our pit and my brother is out on a lap. I go back to the finish line to wait for the winners and he comes through around 11:20am. I don't think he will go for another lap so I watch Chris Eatough come through for 2nd place (poor guy was in tears....I felt so bad for him) and then Craig Gordon come through for 1st (and nearly collapses). It was also cool to see Sue Haywood win. I watched the interviews and then saw my sister in law come by. I ask where my brother is and she said he is on another lap. I look at my watch and think it is 11:45am and I could probably squeeze one more lap in but would need to catch up to my brothers sizeable lead. I am majorlly pissed now and ride back to the pits. Only to find my brother sitting there with his street clothes on. He and his wife thought it was a pretty funny joke and they certainly got me! We had been playing jokes on each other all race (hiding eachothers bikes etc) so he got the last laugh. But I still beat him!

In the end the race didn't go according to plan but I didn't go in with huge expectations. I knew my conditioning was suspect (....I guess that is what happens when you don't ride enough) but I had a great time and thought it was cool riding with some of the stars of this sport.

We packed up on Monday morning and headed to Florida for a well deserved vacation. It was quite eventful as well with the strangest thing happening is me saving the life of a grandma and 2 year old girl from drowning in the hotel pool.

The drive home was awful. We had about 22 hours to cover and drove for about 12 hours the first day with the plan being to stop in Charlotte for the night at 8:30pm. Unfortunately there wasn't a hotel to be found for a 100 miles and we ended up driving until 1am before we found a stinky, smoke filled room with a busted toilet to stay in. The most disappointing thing was having to drive through the Virginia's at night....it is such a nice drive in the daytime. We managed to get home the next day around 4pm and quickly got back to our regular routine.

I have done a few fun rides and plan to get back into the swing of things in a few weeks. Many thanks go out to Wicked Fast Nutrition, Kenda Tires, FSA, Rudy Project and Formula Brakes for supporting me this season. It was a tumultous one but I had a good time none the less.

So I was supposed to do the Pauls Dirty 100KM a few weeks ago. I had the best of intentions and even woke up at 4:45am to get ready. Unfortunately I woke up to rain and the forcast of thunderstorms. So I nixed the race and went back to bed!

Leaving tomorrow to head down to the 24 hr world solo championships in Conyers Geogia. Getting pretty excited, especially because it looks like they are filming a full on movie about the race and Chris Eatough trying to win his 7th title. Who knows, maybe I might make it into the movie. It's nice to dream anyways.

Race reports to follow a couple of weeks later cuz we're going to Florida afterwards for a holiday.

Steve

Epic Ride

I went for a an epic 5 hour ride this past weekend. I haven't had so much fun in a long time. I decided to do some exploration on trails I had never done before. To get there I had to ride for about an hour and then go to the trailhead. There were several cars parked but I never saw anyone. The trail started out as ATV double track which was pretty rutted up and full of puddles. Once past this section I came upon the technical track in the Niagara Escarpment. Now I am not one for extremely technical riding but I was committed now so kept going. Things started getting ridiculously rocky but to my amazement I was able to ride about 95% of it. It was liberating! I must have rode this type of trail for about an hour before I came to the section to descend the escarpment. It looked very daunting and I got off my bike to start walking down. Then I started noticing some lines down the steep, boulder strewn, with rocky dropoffs descent. I went back to the top and hopped on the bike and started going down. Much to my amazement I cleaned the whole thing. I was very happy and I owe most of the credit to riding the Asylum 29er. Throughout the whole trail I would just roll over the rocks without a hint of going over the bars or crashing. I am convinced I would have had problems on my old bike and walked much more. It was a real confidence booster. Once I exited that trail I went over to Kelso Conservation Area to check out the Ontario Cup Provincial Championships course but unfortunately it wasn't marked. I did my usual loop and was pretty tired plus I still had to ride home which took over an hour. Got home after the 5 hour ride and my legs were on fire!!! I couldn't even stand so I assume that is the feeling of cramping (never happened to me before). It was painful, but I figured it meant I put in a solid ride. I was supposed to race at the Durham Durango, but I sure am glad I decided to do this epic instead!

24 Hours of Albion Hills

Raced as a tag team at this past weekends 24 Hours of Albion Hills. It was a fairly large race with about 1400 riders in all catagories. Our goal was to do 20 laps which seemed quite achievable at the start of the race. My partner started out first and turned in a pretty fast 1 hour lap. I went out and suffered a little bit on my first lap. I always do as my body gets used to the riding (read: no warmup) but turned in a respectable 1:03. My partner did one more lap and then I went out for a double lap so he could watch his son in the kids race. The 2nd lap of the double was a bit crummy but I was looking forward to my 2 hour break to eat and rest for awhile. When my partner got back from his double he didn't look too good. He said he wasn't feeling good and was going to stop. I went out and did my next lap (1st night lap) and when I returned he wasn't at our transition area. I rode back to our pit to find him in his street clothes. He was done. I lost motivation after that and took a long break. I was on my own for the rest of the race so decided to wait until morning to go out again. I put in a few more laps and felt pretty good, finishing with a fairly strong last lap. Needless to say we didn't do well but I still had fun and felt good for most of the race. The course was very tough with a lot of climbing involved. The other big problem was it was very sandy due to no rain for a long time. It created really bad ruts on the tight switchback downhills which became difficult to manage at night as it was hard to see them well.

Next race is Pauls 100km in September. I hope to break 8 hours (would be record for me) so I better start working on my climbing again because there is a lot of it on this course.

Steve

24 hours of Albion Hills coming up

The next 24 hour is coming at Albion Hills on Aug 19/20. Doing this race as a tag team just to mix things up a little bit. Pre-rode the course today doing 2 laps to see what things were like. Pretty good, much different than the June course. Tons of climbing. Should be fun.

Haven't done much riding the past week due to a family camping trip but did a fair bit the weeks prior. My climbing on the road has gotten much better but for some reason it doesn't translate that well onto the trails. Not sure why....probably the style of climbing on the road which is long steady and smooth or short steeps with recovery at the end. MTBing just doesn't afford a lot of recovery like road riding. I guess I should start working on my climbing using the MTB on the trails. Maybe that will help.

Race recap coming after next weekend.

24 Hours of Summer Solstice wrap up

Another 24 hour race is in the books and while the course was primed and fast, my body unfortunately was not. We got up to Albion Hills around 9am to finish getting set up the remainder of our pit. We were fairly low key and I was fairly relaxed. The whole family but myself had a cold and I had been desperately fighting it so I would be healthy for the race. I had a sore throat for a couple of days but that was it and I felt okay on Saturday. The race start was uneventful except for the fools who think they have the right to pass you when it is a steady line of people in the singletrack. That is the way the 1st lap goes so people need to just settle down a little. I finished the first lap in the middle of the pack but I definitely didn't have the top end speed I would have liked. As the race progressed one thing I noticed was how improved my singletrack riding was. I was consistently catching and passing people in that area, only to be re-passed on the double track and climbs. I attribute much of this to the 29er and the increased confidence it has given me this year. I am taking corners much faster than I ever used to. Here are a few pics of the event:


Getting ready for the start of the race with my excellent support crew.

Coming into the pits

Heading out for another lap.

By the evening I had a full blown cold and no motivation to head out riding. I decided to get a good night sleep and ride again in the morning which I did. I ended up in 23rd place which isn't great (out of 31). I need to get better and then work on improving my speed on the double track sections where I was losing a lot of time.

I've been thinking about doing a 24 hour race in Vermont in July. More for a family getaway (the kids love going to these races!) than anything. I'll probably wait until the week before to make a decision on that.

Steve