Richard Paine and Stephen Davies are two middle aged men who are passionate about cycling. They combine busy work and travel schedules with sneaky training sessions. They have previously knocked off a couple of TransAlps and love the adventure of multistage mountain bike races.
Steve lives in Sydney and rides with the Tour de Cure bunch out of Neutral Bay. He is a one trick pony who can’t sprint, can’t time trial and can’t descend.
Richard has no such limitations. Rich lives in Singapore and races with the ANZA Mavericks. He is mining a rich vein of form this year which has seen him win the super masters category in the Singapore Nationals for the TT, the road race and the XC.
Stage 3 was like going to a ski resort and skiing all the best runs in one day, the only problem was that we had to “earn our turns” with grinding climbs. Today’s stage consisted of 5 climbs of over 300m vertical and 4 ripping descents. Each descent was very different in character. The first descent “Swine Flu” was memorable for the long steep berms down the fall line. Hard to commit to but worth it for the acceleration. The second descent “Mushroom Head” followed by “Dem Bones” was dry, not too steep and super fast. The third descent was rocky, rooty, steep, tight and technical and taken at low speed. From the little that I remembered of the final descent “Brokeback Ridge”, there were lots of long fast berms and jumps.
I don’t want to talk about the climbs, it brings back too many painful memories. Needless to say, they were very steep, gnarly and technical, and for that reason very hard to get into a rhythm. We thought that yesterday would be the day to sort the wheat from the chaff but today was the day. All the short bursts of maximum effort to get up pinch climbs or over roots, rocks and logs took its toll on tired legs. By half way up the second last climb I had completely lost my enthusiasm for life. I was riding by myself and ended up lifting the bike over all the technical sections and pushing up all the pinch climbs.
The final climb up to Island Lake Lodge was about 20% so almost everyone pushed. I think that my granny gear was worn out by that stage.
From a competitive standpoint we placed 8th today. We came up to the Tinhorn boys with about 600m to go and they looked as bad as us. We put the hammer down and clawed one minute back on them. Great to see old men racing hard.
Today was closest to the hardest day that I have had on a bike (4 1/2 hours at 9.6km/hr ave tells it all) but also one of the most enjoyable days. Each one of today’s descents was up there with the best I have ridden and to have pulled it off without a fall was fantastic.
Early rise tomorrow as we head into the Rockies.
The next three stages will have Steve and Rich camping in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies – fingers crossed they can hunt down some wifi and stay in touch.