Race Reports 28 May 2007 08:09 pm
Tag Team at the Opus Spring Epic 8
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!
on 28 May 2007 at 9:02 pm 1.True North Cycles Racing Team » One Gear, Two Riders, Third Place said …
[...] for me, and Adam was a great partner to race with – everything went like clockwork. Check out more details of the race over on my [...]