Double Header Gongshow

With the ’09 mountain bike racing season coming to a close my buddy Simon and I had a little adventure lined up to end it in grand style. The plan was to race the 70 km Cheakamus Challenge in Squamish on Saturday then hop in my nascar racing truck and drive 11 hrs to Bragg Creek for the Bow 80 on Sunday. We figured if everything went perfect we could be in Calgary by 1 am for a decent sleep before a nice sunny ride on a beautiful Bow 80 course followed by ice cream cakes and swimming with hot girls in a lake afterwards.

At 10 am Saturday morning we set off with 260 other riders to race up to Whistler on some super fast rolling trails. Things went pretty straight forward with Marty Lazarski (Rocky Mountain) and I battling it out for the win. With around 8 km to go a stick slammed in my derrailure, I stopped for 7 seconds to get it out, Lazarski gapped me and I could never close it with him eventually pulling away for a 2 minute win. Simon would come across the finish line soon after in 13th place and then the next race was on as we hopped in the transport machine and peeled off to Alberta at 3 pm. From this point on the small korean guy with the big stick began wailing on the gong.

Between pit stops, highway construction, a crazy rainstorm over rogers pass and a 1 hr time change our perfect schedule ran ontime like a ukraniane wedding as we rolled into Bragg creek at 4 am. We were hoping to party with the Bow cycle guys at there end of season bash but they were being good race organizers instead of hardcore partiers as they had already gone to bed. With the race starting at 7:30 we figured sleep was a good idea and pulled our sleeping bags out and slept in a meadow. At 4:45 it began to rain and soon after Simon took off for the truck and I moved below a large pine tree for shelter. At 5:30 the rain began dripping through the tree. I tried to think like a fish and enjoy the wetness of my soaked sleeping bag but I'm not a fish and was soon off to the pickup to find Simon. At this point we were both not super stoked. The next hr was spent contemplating our decision making skills and searching around my truck in 2 weeks of piled up gongshowness to find our riding gear and food. After being told I couldn't race by the lady at the sign up desk then being allowed to race as the other lady remembered me from last season I made it to the line just in time to head off with the other racers to try and defend my title from last yr.

Early on I realized the day was going to be hard work as the internal racing system was short circuiting and I felt more like a 13 yr old hockey player with a concusion playing in the 6 am sunday morning game of a five game tounament than a biker. Probably too my advantage the weather on the day was short circuiting worse than I was and the light drizzle we left in was a full on downpour and pretty soon frosty began spitting large snowflakes down at us. I was super stoked as I hadn't been in the snow in over 16 months but that feeling was overiddened by an odd numbness which would take over for the rest of the day. If it was a treeplanting day we would've planted for a half hr to make camp costs and then started lighting things on fire. This was a bike race though and Brian Cooke and Brian Bain were riding hard for the win. Cooke would drop off but Bain was taking advantage of my concussed hockey player riding skills on the technical sections and I was clawing back on the climbs. With 15 km to go Bain and I were riding togethar and going down one hill he told me he was going to die. Soon after we began running up most the climbs to stay warm and coasting slower on the downhills to prevent wind chill. It was fricken cold still, probably in the top 2 of my coldest rides ever next to another eskimos day in Chile.

We had no choice but to ride happily on through the snow with Bain eventually dropping off on one of the climbs. Riding alone in the lead I did a sketchy endo in a hub deep mud puddle but felt zero pain when I landed thanks to my numbed body. Pretty cool I thought, I was now a feelingless human pin ball but somehow the legs still went around which was nice. With .5km to go from the finish I came to a sign reading "Tom's Snow re-route", pointing right off the main trail. Thinking like a concussed 13 yr old hockey player I went right as I figured some guy named Tom had made a re-route to shorten the course due to the snow. Apparantly it wasn't the right way as after a while I finally re-connected to the real trail to find myself in 2nd place with Brian Cooke 20 ft ahead. Feeling like Frosty the snowman on drugs I chased up to him and said "Hey", he looked back confused asking "what???what the hell are you doing here??". "I'm cold." I responded as I sprinted ahead to take a 6 second victory to defend my Gold Buckle from last yr.

At the finish line I was escorted bye Mrs.Bain to the medical trailer where Brian Bain and I would spend the next 1 hr curled up in sleeping bags, drinking hot coco and acting like drunk 13 yr old concussed hockey players. As the day wore on only 40 of the 180 riders would finish as the other 140 were either pulled or had enough logic to pull themselves from the snowy gongshow. My buddy Simon spent his race leap frogging from warm car to car to keep warm as he was determined to make it two for two on the weekend as well. By the time the last rider crossed the line the sun poaked through the clouds but there would be no ice cream cakes or swimming in lakes with hot girls this day.

The next day Simon and I were unproductive. We left our campsite at 1 pm to find the ranger had locked the exit gate on us. After trying to move some rocks we put the 4x4 on and made our own road out. Tuesday more of the same continued as we went for ride in revelstoke and ended up hiking our bikes in the dark below some huge rock bluffs for close to an hr. Today is Wednesday and nothing has happened yet as we are having coffees and green teas discussing a no body moves, nobody gets hurt tactic for the day.