The 5th Ontario cup mountain bike race was right in between Bracebridge and Gravenhurst Ontario. A venue built and owned by a guy who loves mountain biking.
Imad,Ryan and I liked our chances as most of the top guys were away at the World cup in Windham, NY.
We set up camp close by and got in a couple good pre-ride laps on a course with an awesome section very similar to Ridgetop in Kanata lakes. We seemed to have an edge through there due to our home made skills from riding Kanata often enough.
We ate dinner and were forced to our tents early due to an obscene amount of mosquitos. But that made for a nice long sleep, (9hrs for me), I think Imad got about 11hrs in his makeshift bed in his so called "tent", which is actually his truck with the seats down.
After some final adjustments on the bikes we headed for coffee. We had a choice between Mcdonalds and Tim's. Ryan and chose Mcdonalds, Imad chose both and got coffees an mcmufins from each. Before heading back for the battle, we decided to take a swim in the nice big lake, and man, did it feel good!! Dropped the core temperature dramatically on a +27 humid day. Ok. on to the race.
We were off at 1:30pm. Imad drove a mean pace and led us for the first part with a field of about 30 already starting to string out. I quickly moved up and took over the lead with Ryan right on my wheel. I led through until about 1/2 way through the first lap and out of all the rocky stuff. Ryan took over from there and at this point there was only 3 of us, Ryan, me and Preston Wagler. Just before the end of the first lap Danny Souter caught up and attacked. I couldn't quite hold on after my effort and fell about 5 sec off pace.
I came through the feed zone in 4th and missed my feed as my feeder wasn't expecting me to be so close to Ryan. Thankfully I still had a little water left in my bottle and was able to make it around again without cramping.
Fast forward 4 laps later....I was holding 4th strong with about 500meters to go and messed up my pass on a Masters rider, sending myself into a tree stump and dislocationg my thumb. I was able to hop back on but couldn't respond to John Slaughter who took home 4th leaving me to roll in 5th.
Imad was not far behind and claimed 6th!
We found out that Ryan had jammed up his chain and had fallen back a bit leaving him to claim 3rd!
So all in all in was a pretty successful weekend. All 3 of us made the big podium and even won a little bit of dough!
Next year with a little bit of luck I think we should be able to pull off the win.
No comments:
Post a Comment