The last race of my three week mountain bike adventure was the Canadian Nationals in Mount Saint Anne, Quebec, which will now be known as Marie-Heleneville. It is really great how big a star she is in that area (and more and more, around the world) and just goes to show how important local support is. Mt Saint Anne is about 45km from Quebec City, and always offers mud, short climbs, and soem really gnarly trails, and this year, despite the warm weather, was all of the above. My goal for the race was a solid top five and that is what I did…. The results of the race were as follows: Marie-Helene was first, Alison Sydor was second, then Kiara Bisaro, and Trish nipped me on the last lap to steal fourth. I was really giving it everything, I had to drag race Lynn Bessette to the first piece of singletrack, where she promptly dropped out, and everything I had was only good enough for fifth. It was another example of how difficult it is to race two sports, as I am sure running and swimming contributed to the ten minute deficit to Marie, however, 10 minutes to a world cup winner when you are crashing every lap in the descents is probably expected. For a good technical rider, I really sucked. Mountainbiking is so mental that when you try TOO hard, there is trouble.
So my buddy Danelle did not have the best race, biomechanicalling in the first meter, but finished for training. I think this mountain bike racing will pay off later for both of us in the Xterra stuff, but both at the same time is difficult. So this will be a short report on this race, after driving to Ottawa (5 hours) sleeping a bit, packing up, flying Ottawa to Toronto, hopping a plane to Heathrow (no sleep) and then another to Prague, followed by a three hour drive to Hluboka nad Vltavou (no bike)… stay tuned for the Czech Xterra report…. M