Last weekend was the first real DH race of the season. We packed up on Friday and headed south to Port Angeles Washington for a combined Northwest and BC Cup race. The shuttle system was pretty interesting. They stuffed us in big U-Haul trucks and drove (more like bounced) us up the mountain. It was quite the experience. Plus I was riding and still tuning my new bike that I had only ridden once the night before and had crashed. The morning didn’t feel the greatest as I was still messing with suspension settings, but towards the end of practice I was dialing it in. The last couple of runs I started trying to push the bike, which wasn’t really ideal since we only had 4 hours to practice. We got in 6 or 7 practice runs, just enough to know the course. I wasn’t feeling that confident, but I knew that there was nothing I could do, so my goals were just to get down the mountain as smoothly and quickly I could while being cautious enough so that if the bike decided to do something strange, I would be able to compensate for it. I ended up getting the race run I was comfortable with and only made one small mistake in a corner. I was 12th out of 45 and only 7 seconds back from 1rst place. 7 seconds may seem like a lot, but I can think of a lot of places on that course that I could make up that time. Lesson learned? Go up a day early so I can get more practice runs and don’t build a bike and expect myself to be used to it after one run.
What? But I just got one? Well this one is different, it comes with a team to ride with! You must be thinking, what bike comes with a team, It is none other than the 2014 GT Fury. This whole thing has been in the works for a while, but last thursday the bike and suspension arrived! And in doing that, it only gave me one run before we had to pack up and leave to Port Angeles for the first NW/BC Cup race. I will be putting up pictures and a further explanation on the bike and the team later once I finish cleaning it up from last weekend.
As you can see, trying to wheely across the finish line when your rear brake doesn’t work and while being clipped in doesn’t work out the best…
As we all know after reading my previous post, sleep is important, but there are things that are preventing sleep. Mainly technology. I admit to reading my emails before I get out of bed in the morning. Which are you guilty of?
I recently had to turn down a grassroots sponsorship offer from Cove Bike Shop due to the wheelbase on their DH bike being shorter than I need. Because I’m tall, it is hard to find bikes that have a long enough wheelbase, even in Large sizes. Unfortunately, the wheel base of the of the Cove Shocker is 37mm shorter than my Commencal.
I’m pretty disappointed because it’s a pretty neat bike and that I won’t be riding for our local bike shop. Cove have been building excellent bikes on the North Shore for a long time and have a lot of cool people working in the shop which I think I could have benefited from. Hopefully there will be more opportunities in the future!
My dad shared this info graph with me this morning and I found it quite interesting. I never knew that athletes got THAT much sleep (with the exception of Tiger Woods). This info graph shows the importance of sleep, but unfortunately it doesn’t explain HOW one could get that much sleep. I don’t know I could go to bed at 6:00 or 7:00 PM and expect to fall asleep within a few minutes…
I just got home from a weekend in Whistler/Pemberton training with Todd Schumlick, the owner and director of PerformX Racing. We spent time learning workouts in the gym, talked about the mental aspect of racing, and talked about nutrition. I had a great time and learned a lot.
The main things that I took away from this weekend are:
- I need to do it on my own.
- Nobody can get stronger or faster but myself.
- I need to put the time and effort into training.
In nine weeks I’m getting back together with Todd to update some of the workouts and plan for the race season.
We’ve had quite a bit of rain falling here in North Vancouver so getting out to ride has become a little bit of a hard thing to do considering I have a brother who doesn’t like to ride in the rain for fear of getting wet. I’ve never been able to figure that one out… Yesterday was no different and it was actually raining quite hard so even I was contemplating doing a workout rather than hit the trails. I soon realized that I shouldn’t even be considering training over riding a bike after not riding for a week, so we picked up a friend and went out to Cypress to get some wet weather riding in. After getting to the top, I was glad to say that it wasn’t raining. It was snowing… It all went downhill from there (pun intended) all three of us had some pretty good crashes and got very very wet and cold.
My two companions contemplating ditching me and taking the warm truck ride home.
Although we could wring water out of our gloves and our bikes were 10 pounds heavier with mud, it was a good day.
We went for a ride on Seymour after the week of cold and snow thinking that it might be good to ride. When we got to the top, however, this is what we saw…
It was still winter up top with plenty of snow, but that didn’t stop us.
And look, it’s spring at the bottom! That shows how a little elevation change can make a huge difference. Even with all of the snow on the top, none of it was actually on the trail. I guess the North Shore trail gnomes were doing their job of keeping the trails clean and clear for us to ride!
I just finished putting in a M500 240GB Solid State Drive into my macbook because It wasn’t able to edit videos that well. It was actually quite easy! These are the directions I followed.
http://www.tuaw.com/2013/05/14/mac-101-upgrade-to-ssd/
Now I’ll be able to edit the videos that I’ve taken this past summer and the ones I am taking now, so stay tuned!
Final Cut Pro working smoothly…