To change things up, this blog post was written by my brother and BCBR race partner. His perspective....
I think I heard about the BC Bike Race for the first time about five years ago. I hadn’t been mountain biking for long, and it sounded pretty hardcore. When I moved back to Calgary in 2012, the MTB bug definitely bit me, and soon trails that seemed too steep or too hard before were all I wanted to ride. How could I loop that into a 30km+ epic? This was my thought when I looked at the trail map.
But, can I even ride that stuff on the coast? My
time at the 2013 Gearjammer race in Squamish had me doubting this.
You’re supposed to
ride your bike down this?
After some training and a few races in 2014,
including the Canmore and Lethbridge Short XC races and the Fernie 3, the
technical skills were starting to get there. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to do
the BCBR in 2015. Was I willing to shoulder the cost in
family time, training time, and dollars? With lots of encouragement from my
brother and a bit of soak time, I was ready to commit.
At least I already had the right bike. 140mm
Pike on the front, dropper seatpost, and Snakeskin Nobby Nic on the front -
this is overkill for the local Alberta trails, but if I was building a bike
from scratch for BCBR, this is how I would have built it. I built a bike to
bolster my weakness - technical riding.
One week after the end of cyclocross season in
November, I started on the training program. Winter nights (and some 5AM wakeup
calls) were for sitting on the trainer in the basement, and cyclocross world
cup videos on the home theatre (with TrainerRoad running along the bottom). I had
acquired a Stages power meter a few months earlier, and at first the output
looked like this:
Going from ten hours a month on the bike during
the off-season to thirty eventually had an effect. Riding the fatbike helped
too. In April, during a team ride, I looked around while riding up the
Gleneagles climb in Cochrane, and realized it was just me and a couple of Cat
1/2 guys. I guess I must have been doing something right…
At the end of April I decided that doing my
VO2max intervals would be more fun on the velodrome than in the basement, so I
turned up at the first Thursday night race and pinned a number on. I ride a
fixed gear bike to work every day, and although it had been awhile, this was
not my first time on the track, so I wasn’t intimidated by the bike. The first two races, a scratch race and a
win-and-out went well - 1st place. The third race was an avalanche; I decided I
didn’t need to win every
intermediate sprint, so I tucked in behind the second fastest person to bide my
time. Unfortunately for both of us, at the end of the sprint she apparently
stopped pedaling, which sent her down hard, and according to my Garmin, sent me
flying at 61 km/hr up and over the Glenmore Pool before landing back on the
track, head first:
The next thing I remember after the crash was
the ambulance pulling onto the infield half an hour later. A trip to the hospital
confirmed that I didn’t break anything, but
had a concussion (and was also introduced to the wonders of Tegaderm for road
rash). This was one week before I was supposed to fly to Vancouver to pre-ride
3 of the stages of the race with my brother to help allay my fears of BC gnar. Not good…
This was not the only setback in April. A
routine stop at the dermatologist back in March turned something up, but I wasn’t to worry. They did a local biopsy, just
to confirm that it wasn’t
something more serious, then a letter came in the mail - melanoma on my chest. Also not good…
Mid-May, and two weeks after the concussion
(which was mostly better by then), I was being put under for surgery on the
melanoma and a lymph node biopsy. Two decently-sized scars (so much for my male
modelling career) and some more recovery time. While I was waiting for results,
training for a bike race was not at top-of-mind, but I tried to keep at it.
Cancer and a concussion, double whammy. Training plan took a hit but bounced right back.
The good news finally came on June 3rd - the
initial biopsy had removed all of the cancer, and there was no metastasis. I
was downgraded to “low-risk”. Game on. I celebrated by signing up for
the five hour Organ Grinder race four days later.
27th out of 51 in
Open Men class, with wounds still healing... (Photo: Masa Higuchi)
So there you have it - my training lead-up was a
little more eventful than I would have liked, but I’m going to make the most of it. I’ve cleaned every square inch, and torqued every bolt on my bike. June 28th - let’s do this.
(Photo: Masa Higuchi)
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