Crank the Shield

Crank the Shield was one of my big races for the year, and it is the one that went well.  The race, new this year, was a three day stage race from Buckwallow to Haliburton.  We stayed at the convenient Skyways Motel the night before the race and were up early on Friday morning for the first stage.  I was racing, Eva was volunteering as race support, as her health is still preventing her from racing the long races.  The weather was pretty much perfect for all three days of the race, sunny and cool.  The first stage started through Buckwallow mtb center, and I worked hard to get into the singletrack with faster riders, so that I would be with the faster riders when we came out of the trails and onto the road sections

I can out of the singletrack with a good group of riders, and we were soon moving along the the first road section at a good 40kph, which was hard to keep up on the singlespeed.  I was soon joined by Scott Bentley, who had picked a monstrous 44:18 gear for the first day just for the road sections.  I raced with a 34:17 for all the days.  I barely hung on with the road group, and Scott actually dropped the group on a climb and disappeared up the road.  Next was the first ATV section, which was bog after bog.  Not my idea of a fun race course.  Mark Summers caught me in this section, and soon moved ahead as well.  The rest of the day was more bogs and then gravel road to the finish.  Scott, Mark then me was the finishing order in singlespeed.  The first stage had few redeeming features.  Buckwallow is great, but not at the start of a race in a crowd.  Racing on the road is a pain on a singlepeed.  Bogs are just not my idea of a fun time.

After as much food and sleep as I could cram in, Day 2 kicked off with more good weather.  The second stage started off with a gravel section into ATV trail.  This ended up being exciting, as the lead riders were cat and mousing to get into the narrower trail first, so the pace on the gavel was actually low, and we hit the ATV trail in a tight bunch.  The trail settled into the form for most of the day – highly erroded ATV trail over Canadian shield with lots of mud in all the low spots.  For most of the day I paced with Scott and Joe Cruz, while Mark was already out of site up ahead.  Joe was riding everything beautifully, which had me worried until I realized he had a low gear on – the course finished with ~20km of flat rail trail.  Towards the end of the day, Scott and I had managed to loose Joe on some short road sections, and I put a bit of a gap on Scott at the second aid station.  I kept ahead until the final rail trail, and put my head down and tried not to look back.  The race ended Mark, then me, then Scott, but Scott had enought time from the first day to remain in second place overall, while I was third overall.

The last day was the only day with trail that I actually enjoyed riding – Haliburton forest.  After a neutral ride out to the start, the stage started with lots of gravel climbing along fire road before working into Haliburton forest with a good mix of gravel sections and singletrack, with lots of elevation change.  I stuck with the same gear for the whole race, which meant my gear was a bit hard for the day.  Joe, Mark and Mark where ahead of me from the start, while I traded places with Scott and Pter for most of the day.  As soon as it started to get more technical, I managed to start putting in some ground on Scott.  The trails were awesome, and I pulled in fourth, with enough time on Scott to take second overall behind Mark.  I’m very happy with how the race went, and with my result.  The competion was great, the race was well organized, the food was awesome.  The first two stages, I can do without.  Mud and ATV’s don’t make for good riding in my book.  The staged format was not as hard as I was expecting.  12 hours of riding spread over three days goes a lot easier than 24 in one day, but the pace is very high.

Iron Cross

Iron Cross was my other big race of the year, and it did not go so hot. After my stellar performance at Crank, I had high expectations for Iron Cross. I raced the first stage at Crank (comparable lenght) at a much higher level of intensity than my normal enduro pace with out fading. I was setting my sites at a 4:30 or better time for Iron Cross. I did 4:40 last year, and was feeling stronger than last year at Crank. Iron Cross is one of my all time favourite events. The course is amazing, the organizers are great, the prize money is good and the atmosphere and attitudes of the racers are awesome. I prepared well for the race, but off the start, my leg were heavy, and never warmed up. less than ten minutes into the race, I was waving Drew and Nick of to go ahead and drop me. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it up the first major climb – the KOM climb.

The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I had to make it up the climb to get back to the start, even if I was going to DNF. At the top of the climb I decided to ride it out and settled into a more relaxed pace. Even then, my legs hurt far more then they should. I don’t know if I’m burnt out from the Crank or just sick, but I certainly wasn’t going anywhere fast last Sunday. Since I wasn’t going to collecting any results, I made sure to collect good karma – I gave my inflator to one guy stuck with a flat and no air. Next I came across a guy you had managed to loose *ALL* of his chainring bolts, at about the furthest point from the start finish that you can get. I scavenged two bolts from my bike (leaving me with three) and supplemented his setup with a strategic twist tie. We both made it in without any chainring incidents -so the fix was sufficient.  I ended up finishing in around 5:10, well off the pace.  We managed to pull in second place in the team catagory, good for $100 cash to fund margerita’s for everyone that evening, but that is another story….

We rode a couple of loops of the Albion Summer Solstice 24hr race course on Saturday. The course is very similar to last year, with a couple of minor changes and some new links between sections that have been on before, but in different orders.  There are no big hills, and a number of flat open stretches – so slap a big gear on that singlespeed.  I was riding 34:18 and it was not too steep.

On Saturday, I got in a great 5 hour ride on my cyclocross bike. Right now it’s set up fixed (42:16) with Panaracer Pasela 700x32C tires. I rode down to Cambridge, where I met up with Dave Beer, then we headed south on the rail trail past Paris before looping back up on a mix of gravel and minor paved roads. The rail trail was pleasantly shady and cooler. The gravel roads were hot. The pavement sections were unbearably hot.

Sunday was the O-Cup at Kelso. I was not sure how this was going to go, given ~120km of gravel riding the day before and my less than stellar performance at the O-Cups so far. Well, things were grooving. Sunday was hotter I think, but at 9:30am it didn’t feel anything like the afternoon heat the day before. I took it easy on the big exposed climb then focused on turning the pedals over through the flats and technical sections. I ended up 8th, and only ~7min down from the leaders – by far my best result of the season. Kudos to Nick who ended up 2nd, and Dave Beer, who had a strong performance as well after braving the heat on Saturday with me.

The quote of the day goes to Dave Dermont, who raced to victory in Expert 45-49 in the 1:30pm heat:

Going up the climb, it felt like my head was going to explode like a piece of popcorn!

Even from the satellite imagery, you can see how scenic the course is. Here are the stats from my race:

100km, 2000m of climbing, 72 kph maximum speed. I was riding my True North Cycles custom cyclocross bike with 39:20 gearing and Michelin Jet tires at 65 PSI. The gearing was perfect, those tires are very fast on the gravel, and the pressure was high enough to avoid pinch flats on the high-speed, rough gravel descents. The race started at 9:00. The sun was just coming up over the hills and it was quite chilly – there was a good layer of frost on the grass at dawn. The weather was very similar to last year, not a cloud in the sky. Remembering how much it warmed up last year, I started wearing shorts, jersey, knee and arm warmers but no jacket or vest. It was cold on the start line, but perfect when we got going. I had two bottles of e-load on the bike, hammer gel and a couple of Cliff bars. Earlier, I’d sent two more bottles off to Check Point 3 with the support crew. I was planning to stay with Dave Dermont for as long as possible, and that proved difficult. He moved through the start crowds on the IC Lite course pretty quickly and set a fast pace down the initial gravel walking path. Adam was with us for a while, but dropped off when he couldn’t match Dave’s pace crossing the sandy beach. I stayed with Dave up the next section of rolling paved climbs, but by the time we turned off onto the first section of gravel forest road, it was clear that my average heart rate was too high to hold for the duration of the race. I said good-bye to Dave and brought the pace down a notch. There were lots of geared riders around to work with, but Dave steadily moved ahead and out of sight.

Next was some rolling paved roads leading to the King/Queen-of-the-Mountain climbs and CP1. I dropped my arm warmers here as it was warming up nicely. Now some more gravel road before a sharp left into the technical Lippencote trail that descends down to more paved sections. I had no problems with the technical descents, passing many riders that were forced to dismount and proceed on foot. Most of them caught up on the next section, however, which was downhill paved roads. I was spun out and never caught a good draft off of a geared rider, so focused on recovery and eating. This was followed by climbing gravel road leading to the power line ‘run-up’ – a massive scramble up a steep rock slope that never seemed to end. The views from the top were impressive! Now more gravel forest road, followed by high speed gravel descents into some more paved roads and then CP3. I stopped briefly to pick up fresh bottles of e-load and got back on the bike quickly as I could see one of the riders up the road was obviously on a single speed bike. The rider (who I now know is Fxdwhl) was pushing a bigger gear and was forced off the bike on the climbs out of CP3. I caught and passed him on the climbs – noticing that he was riding a fixed gear. I don’t know how he kept it together on those gravel descents! Knowing he was right behind me steeled my resolve and I pushed through the entire climbs and came over the last real peak in the course (at around 75-80km) feeling strong. Most of the rest of the course was straight forward single track with lots of hidden rocks to look out for and only two sections that I had to run up. I was definitely in a lot better shape at this stage than during the race last year, and the final sections went by quickly. Finally some paved rollers back into the start finish area, one last lap through Saturday’s IC Lite CX course and over the finish line barricades. 4:41, 2nd place behind Dave D, True North Cycles 1st in the Memphis Blues Team Cup. What more can I say!