Mont-Sainte-Anne World Cup #5

Riding the treacherous "squirrel" - photo thanks to Tim Bardsley-Smith

Another one on the squirrel - photo thanks to Tim Bardsley-Smith

This is how i spent my morning - extreme cycling fan style. Simultaneously watching the grand finale of the Tour de France on the tele, and staring out the window of the apparment at a womens mtb world cup, and recieving live updates of the 24hr of adrenaline on Twitter. All from the comfort of my bed. Yeah the technology! All i need now is a nurse to tend to the bed sores and i could do this forever.

Nick rode to 83rd

Me suffering on the switchback climb

Chris J had another great race for 22nd

Stopped to pump up the tyre

Today's World Cup at Mont-Sainte-Anne was a pretty tough one. It rained during the morning so the course was quite slick when we raced. The big news was the opening of a B-line around "the squirrel" because the UCI was concerned that it was too dangerous. The squirrel consisted of a steep left hairpin on a slaby rock, then a committing rocky chute, and with the recent rain it was quite slippy and scary. Poor old Pat (the track builder) and his team worked all afternoon on Saturday at the whim of the UCI guys to build a brand new track on the side of a very steep hill, an awesome effort. They managed to achieve a b-line that was ridable (at least safer than the A-line) and that was slower than the main line, without making it so slow that running the a-line was ever going to be a good option, well done Pat.

With a lot of single track and 105 riders on the start line, the first lap was the predictable shit fight. I think i fared ok, thanks to some sneaky moves i picked up in Europe. I missed one pearler though when i was stopped and waiting for a bottleneck to clear i saw an option to climb over some logs on the left, unfortunately i was blocked on the right and couldn't get across. 2 seconds later a couple of guys went for it and i reckon they made 10 spots, that would have been gold. I was a bit nervous approaching the squirrel for the first time because i had different tyres than in training because of the rain, and the sudden appearance of a safer option did seem to make sense. I just tried to pretend that the B-line wasn't there, and before i knew it i was bouncing down the muddy rocks on the squirrel a bit sideways with one foot out. Cool.

After the first lap of traffic I settled into a tempo. I was lapping around positioned in the high 60's and was feeling pretty good. The squirrel got a bit less scary and i was able to pass people there most laps, which was nice. But unfortunately i must have been passed by as many people on the climbs because my position remained about 67th. I was loosing time each lap to Absalon though, and i knew that in theses conditions it would be hard to complete the entire race without getting pulled by the 80% rule. I just kept plugging away but on lap 4 I realised that I was slowly loosing air from my back tire. I didn't want to stop and fix it because it would take too long so i tried to nurse it through to the tech-zone where i could get a new wheel. Unfortunately it was bottoming out and burping more and more so i had to stop and add some air. There must have been a glut of riders behind me because even though i only stopped for about 30 seconds, i lost 5 spots. That turned out to be costly too because when i approached the finish of that lap (1 minute later) the little UCI guy with the flag pulled me out...damn! The guys i was with got through for one more lap. Oh well. 69th and 2 laps down. it is not the greatest result, but i did have fun on track.

I have one week to Bromont. Hopefully i can do a couple more laps there!