The weekend started off by meeting my good friend Brett Weersink Saturday morning at Vaughan Mills near Toronto. Brett was one of my co-captains on the Queen's team last year and we made our way up to Hardwood Hills to take part in the team pre-ride and do some riding on the trails afterwards. It was great to see old friends from my year's at Queen's again and I also met some new team members that just joined the sizeable 30 rider team this year. We rode the first lap as one big team, a few injuries and mechanicals happened to occur right away including a separated shoulder (I think?) and a bent derailleur hangar, which caused some delays but is likely to be expected with that large of a group on a trail at once. For lap two the 'A' team and 'B' team's split up into groups and we focused on lines and tactics for the upcoming race. Etienne is running a tight ship this year and has the team riding pretty smoothly, so I'm looking forward to another potential U-cup win for Queen's!
After the ride we headed over to Jeff's famous cottage on Six Mile Lake just down the 400 for some nice relaxing dock time, boating and hot tubbing. Some other highlights included cliff diving, rope swing and a really intense and delicious white chocolate fountain!
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| Etienne is thoroughly enjoying the boat ride |
Now on Sunday it was race time and we all made our way over to Hardwood for the 11am start of the Men's A race. After a tasty breakfast prepared by Jeff's incredibly hospitable parents we were all ready to tear it up! I didn't forget to have my trusty sweet potato of course.
My love for sweet potatoes
After a good warmup with Jason and Cam, practicing the start hill a few times and making sure everything was ready to go I lined up on the front line beside my fellow University racers (as Alumni now). The race start was fast as Will Clarke from Guelph must have been ready to show off his skills at his home course.
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| The Men's A start |
I didn't get the best jump and unfortunately I noticed as I shifted up my gears began skipping right away, which was not the greatest situation to have for the upcoming race. I quickly put that out of my mind and then moved my way up on the climb and entered the singletrack in 1st to try and get myself off to a good start. Fairly quickly a small group consisting of my teammate Etienne, Will C and Alex Flav were riding together for most of the first lap. As we started the long section of doubletrack on the course though I started to lose some time as Will and Etienne got away after I had lead most of the start. I managed to catch back on after ripping it up through coffee run and drafted down along the stretch before the finish line.
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| Having fun on coffee run |
The rest of the race was spent trying to open a gap for Etienne on Will and finally on lap 3 we were able to get a small one through the climbing singletrack sections. I made sure to keep the pace high and tried to pull Etienne along as best as I could. Was glad to be able to use a little bit of team tactics even though I wasn't able to count towards anything in the standings. Etienne and I rode the last couple laps together and in the final sprint he took the lead as I drafted until the last possible second before shifting in my highest gear so as not to cause a skip and sprinted by for the win! I was pretty happy to finally have my first U-cup win after 5 years of racing them and had a very fun weekend as well. I hope to make it back for the final race at Ganaraska Forest and hopefully help out with some more team tactics and watch Queen's hoist the University Cup for the fourth year in a row!
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