David Singlespeed Unrau

Sunset on Jaco beach in Costa Rica. Shot on Delta 3200 B&W film.

It was the Opus Spring Relay event of the Dukes Epic 8 Hour series this past Saturday. This year, I raced tag team with fellow True North Cycles teammate, Adam Lucas. We weren’t expecting much, as the tag team catagory is pretty competative, and we were both racing on our 29er singlespeeds. Race day was great, cool, sunny with some overcast periods. We got Eva set up for her solo race, then got ready to ride. We were each planning to do 2 laps of the 10km course back to back, for about 1 hour of riding before handing off to the other rider. Adam was up first. He got his first two laps off in under an hour, then I was up. I managed around 1:02 for my first two laps. Then some nutrition, a change of clothes, lots of fluid and before you know it, time to go again. I checked the results around 4 hours in - what do you know, we where in third place, but only by about 7 minutes. The pressure was on. We kept the pace up, and finished 15 laps just 51 seconds past the cut-off for going out again, at 6:00:51pm. This was good enough to keep third, and not get lapped by second! I was riding my True North Cycles custom rigid 29er singlespeed with Stan’s Crow tires at ~28psi and 34:19 gearing. I think this setup was pretty good. I can’t decide if the Crow tires are really fast, or if they just feel really fast as their traction is so sketchy. The are certainly not very forgiving. This is what the race course looked like:

The yellow is the 8 hour course, the black line is the 2007 Ontario Cup #1 course from a month or so ago. This is what the vertical profile looked like:

The course was fine, but did not really excite me greatly. I’m not sure why, but a number of the sections just didn’t seem to really flow together well, and other sections are starting to get a lot of brake bumps building up. There were a lot of other True North Cycles race team members at the race, make sure to head over to the True North team website and check out how their races went!

I finally have some pictures of the True North Cycles carbon 29′er singlespeed posted in a gallery page! The bike is going to be racing at the Duke’s Epic 8hr this weekend, at the 24 Hours of Summer Solstice, at Paul’s Dirty Enduro and at the SingleSpeed World Championships in Aviemore, Scotland.

The carbon fiber 29′er prototype is almost ready to roll.  I just finished cleaning up the frame after curing all the joints.  The bike will go together for a test ride tomorrow, then come back apart so I can finish the frame.  Look for the bike at the Duke’s 8 hour race this weekend - if all goes according to plan, it should be racing in solo women!  I’ll get some photos up just as soon as I’ve had a chance to take some.