Carl and I joked that the t-shirts that we received in our race packets on the first day of Transrockies could have said “race for sissies” instead of TR3. We were in Fernie, British Columbia for the start of a weeklong stage race through the Canadian Rockies. But we were just doing the short version, TR3, for solo competitors and, you guessed it, only three days long instead of the full seven. Our t-shirts were emblazoned with the TR3 logo, which we were viewing as the cop-out version of the race. Get our feet wet, check out some scenery, ride hard for our UCI points and be home before our bikes needed a complete overhaul… After three days of racing I no longer consider the finishers of TR3 sissies in the least. Those still out there on the proper seven-day adventure are approaching heroine status.
I’d been looking for an excuse to check out some epic stage racing for a couple years now. I feel like it’s the essence of “mountain biking” and that seems to be reflected in people’s adoption of the genre through more and more new events around North America and the world. La Ruta was a good time but I wanted to see how things have grown Up North and find out if this whole thing was legit. When the Transrockies organization decided to inscript with the UCI for this year’s events, both TR and TR3, I had the excuse I needed. “UCI Points” for the “Olympics”. Perfect cover to head north and find out just how cool Canadia really is.
Waiting in line at the border is boring, unless there are pet rocks to climb. Carl sucks at climbing...
The Transrockies folks were happy to have us and made it easy to show up with the Emmett family RV as our lodging, as driven between stages by her mom Mary. We’re stoked that Kelli had the foresight to purchase said house/garage on wheels. Especially when it was raining. Which it was.
After the TT... I'm tired.
Day one of TR was an individual time trial around the trails of Fernie. The Fernie Trails Alliance has done a bang-up job cutting some rad trail and we were going to shred a fair bit of it. A ride of the second (post-huge climb) 2/3 of the course under sunny skies on Saturday afternoon revealed that they indeed do know what they’re doing up there. Some slow steep tech stuff to keep us honest and some fast radness to keep us dodging trees would prove interesting to race on the next day. With traffic. In the MUD! I woke at 5am to heavy rain on the roof of the garage/bedroom and it was still coming down at noon after a few hundred people had already set out on their TT adventure. They mixed it up good for us but the sun was peeking out as I set off at 1:30pm with Max Plaxton and Carl a minute each behind me. Good thing we didn’t pre-ride the Hyper-Ventilation climb, as I was happy not knowing when the just barely rideably steep switchbacks were going to end. They did, eventually, at a bench perched on the ridge overlooking the valley, as all trails should. No time for the view though, and I was immediately shredding muddy mysterious singletrack for 10 min back to the valley floor. Good stuff up there, FTA. Plaxton used his Canadian knowledge and caught me washing my drivetrain at the aid station. We rode the next hour and ten minutes within sight of each other, having a good time riding just barely rideable bits, fast. And passing people. Lots of them seemed surprised at our arrival considering they’d started up to three hours before us. My favorite was the obligatory German team who, when we requested permission to pass, responded indignantly.
“Why you need to pass now?” to which I replied,
“Because we started two hours behind you, thanks”
Max and I finished together, which meant he beat me by a minute. Shoot. Oh well, that was fun, and HARD. So much steep climbing and clawing for traction packed into 1:55… Third place was 2009 TR3 Winner and Canadian 24 hour solo champ Cory Wallace, but we’d taken 5 minutes out of him so I figured it was a race between Max and I for the overall. Carl was a few minutes behind Cory, something about not being from Maine or BC made it harder for him to ride the track in that particular condition… Kelli handily won the Girls race by a large margin after wisely switching to her Anthem X, thus upping her fun quotient substantially.
Day Two Start in downtown Fernie
Day two dawned foggy and warming, soon giving way to a proper nice day in the mountains. Which was good, as we were headed into them. A 1000 meter climb right off the bat led us to a descent of the same relief, albeit over 6k instead of the 30k that the climb occupied. Steep. The finish was 35k of rolling gravel roads along the Elk Valley floor. After a free tow from the ambitious Czech Masters team for the first 10k, Carl and I rode solid tempo up the next 10k of climb, trimming the group to us, Plaxton and Cory. He seemed strong for a stranger. I got ambitious myself and upped the pace a bit more, hoping to get some time out of Max. Then I stopped for water at the 20k checkpoint, figuring they would too. They didn’t. Just as I caught up they group swerved left to miss a large puddle in the jeep road. I liked the way right looked. Then I didn’t. So left it was. Just turn the bars left and head that way. F**K! MY RIBS! What the hell just happened? Guess there was an apple sized rock where I tried to execute my left turn and a grapefruit sized one where I was deposited on my back, thankfully a few feet shy of the puddle. More swearing prompted Carl to turn around just as I was getting up, wheezing and still swearing, albeit quietly, as breathing hurt enough without yelling. Super cool, I just KO’d myself for no reason. I remounted and rode really slow for a few minutes wondering if I’d broken a rib or two. After a while it subsided a bit and I figured a dose of hardening up and getting back to work was in order. Catching the boys took a few minutes but eventually was done and a small gap re-established as we started climbing singletrack along a ridgeline through beautiful meadows. Cool.
Max and I crested more or less together and spent the next 10 or 15 minutes dropping 3000 feet to the valley floor on a freshly reclaimed mining road-come singletrack. We didn’t even really have a chance to enjoy the view before the plunge started. Then the team time trial on roads for the next hour and change started. Fortunately, Cory bridged up to us and added much needed muscle and youthful enthusiasm to the cause, taking massive pulls until he finally dropped us fair and square on the final rolling climb into Sparwood to win by a few hundred meters. That was hard. Fortunately, it was easy to forget about losing because the world’s biggest truck was parked at the finish line. After a swim in the river Carl and I spent the next while figuring out how it was propelled. We decided it must be a turbodiesel generator running electric engines on each driven axle, kind of like a locomotive for dirt. Or maybe a hydrostatic drive? But where were the hydraulic fluid lines? Hmmm.
Day three was the queen stage of TR3, not to be confused with the queen stage of TR Proper, that was stage 6… After starting in the nice little mining town of Elkford, our queen crossed the continental divide and finished at Etherington Creek campground, roughly in the middle of nowhere, Alberta. The previous night’s Google Earth presentation from race Director Aaron Mcconnell focused on the climb up to the divide. He mentioned a lower section that was “a few kilometers of overgrown mining road, almost completely Alders and quite steep” and an upper section that “turned left from the drainage and climbed straight into the high alpine scree”. The previous days’ 6k/1000m descent had also included sections that were described as unrideable in the presentation but we’d not even really noticed while shredding down. I was hoping for a similar sandbag on this description as well. No such luck…
Carl is usually a positive guy, but he admitted on two separate occasions to turning a corner and actually saying out loud, to himself “you’ve got to be kidding me!” before stepping off his steed and trudging up the pitch. Carl had the foresight to get a punture on the muddy, freshly graded (we passed the grader in the race) logging road that we rode along the Elk River for the first 40k of the race so he at least had people to talk to on the hiking sections as he worked back through the field. I was less clever in my scree field crossing puncture timing, as I’d already been dropped by the leaders on account of feeling generally beat down and didn’t even see anyone WHILE I was fixing my flat, let alone get anyone to ride/walk with out of the deal. Just as I crested the pass I caught sight of Carl, he was about 100 meters behind me, well within voice range, but easily a few minutes in arrears. I focused forward on the incredible view backed up by looming black clouds and thunder in the valleys to the east. Would we get hosed? 15k of primitive trail would take us down to the finish, with one small climb remaining… The shred down would have better been shared with someone, as it was old snowmobile trails with tons of lines and no idea what each one really held. Good times figuring out which was the best option. And good times being done eventually, without getting hailed on.
Carl and I immediately agreed on the finish line that hiking with your bike is stupid. Then, a few minutes and some salty mixed nuts later, we calmed down a bit and realized that we just did an amazing ride through beautiful country that we’d never have done if someone didn’t just tell us to harden up and bit, walk through some alders with your bike and it’ll be totally worth it. I guess that’s the essence of Transrockies, not exactly easy, but totally worth it. Maybe that should be the slogan on their t-shirts…
For our efforts on the day Carl and I ended up 5th and 3rd overall. Cory punched my ticket, and his tire also, on his way to taking ten minutes out of me on the last day to move into second overall. Plaxton won. So did Kelli, she eventually calmed down after the queen stage and realized that we’d done three days of kick-ass riding in the Rockies as well. She had a good enough time that her, Mary and Blake are still there right now, planning to take two days off then race the last two stages into Canmore. Good plan.
We were plenty tired and not even close to considering continuing on for the next four days, so drove back to Lizzy's Parent's house in Montana through Glacier National Park. It was scenic. We're looking for Mountain Goats while waiting for road construction here. Strange combo of activities, that...
Here’s a little video from The LINK, Giant’s 2011 Product Launch to 250 of their best dealers. We were in Deer Valley, Utah, shredding and having a good time hanging out with bike shop guys and girls for a few days before the trip to Canada. It was pretty fun, especially this Wasatch Crest Trail ride, as documented by old buddy Mike Cody here…