From Quebec to Kamloops

With only a week lying between Beauce and the Nationals in Kamloops there wasn’t much to be done in terms of training. My week was comprised of 1 to 1.5 hour training spins in the 39x17 on the bike paths of Toronto, making for some great coffee rides. On the Friday I flew out to BC with my partner in crime and team mate Matt Hansen, a great travelling companion with a sharp whit and a penchant for launching into long engrossing discussions about absolutely nothing; he would have made a great writer for Seinfeld. We stayed in the lovely Ranchland Motel, which unlike many of the other cheap hotels on the strip paralleling Highway 1 unfortunately didn’t have free porn. Probably a good thing actually as in this way we were able to line up on the Sunday fresh for the race; with free porn the tendency is for the TV to stay on late into the evening.

And so to race day. It had been 40C all week, unseasonable warm for June, but we were lucky as race day dawned cool and slightly overcast, perfect racing conditions. This year the course at the Nationals was incredibly challenging, a 10km circuit with a 2km climb (that’s an approximation on my part) which had a couple of nasty steep sections; I rode a 30x26 for the race and used it! The plan was to get into the early break, in which the pace on the climb would be steady rather than the surging that would go on in the peloton. Well things went to perfection on this part of the plan as early in the race I found myself in a good break of 4, bridging across to some guys two minutes up the road. Soon there was a good sized group clear, with Fraser, Tuft and Wholberg eventually gracing us with their company. In the end there were six of us away and there were moments when the time board read forty seconds to the chase, but no one came close enough to endanger our lead. With a distance of 180km the race wasn’t a cake walk and everyone in the break was suffering towards the end of the day. In the end the race came down to the final climb with Alexandre Lavallee launching the attack that made the final decision. I wasn’t able to follow and that was that, I rode in for my finish. All in all it was a great weekend. I did the best that I could, didn’t crack as I sometimes have a tendency to do and enjoyed an incredible day of tough racing.