Day Three: 80k

Day Three was billed as the first day of the real singletrack. However in order to get to the singletrack we had to ride about 40 miles. It would be like if I rode my bike from West Seattle out to Tiger Mountain to do a ride. Why would someone do something so silly? Because we're in the BC Bike Race, that's why. So the race started an hour earlier than usual at 8AM. Dave and I found our place in Starting Group A. There are 3 starting groups: A, B, and C. It makes a world of difference to start up front for a few reasons. Today it helped to start up front because we reached the potentially bottlenecking singletrack in less than 3 miles. You are much better off getting to the singletrack with "good" riders so that you can actually ride the trails instead of walking them. Why walk the trails you say? Well for the uninitiated if there are 300 people trying to ride down a foot and half wide trail, the second someone comes off of their bicycle (for example if they get stuck on a root) then there is domino effect and most of the people behind the offending party must also come off. It makes for some slow going. Luckily Dave and I made the cut and we were able to make it through the first section of singletrack without incident. There were 4 major climbs today and one river crossing. We crisscrossed some beautiful country; snowcovered peaks in the background; a shot of the ocean from atop one of our highpoints. The 40mph descents were fast and super fun, but the slow-going hot-as-hell climbs were another story. After riding the logging roads for some 37miles, we finally made it to the singletrack of Cumberland. Talk about tough. Roots. Drops. Rocks. Twisty-turney. No way to keep your momentum. Dave summoned his "old-man strength" (you know the strength that no matter hold old your dad gets he can still kick your ass) and absolutely railed the singletrack. It was over an hour and a half of just hammering through the woods. We passed many teams there. We worked our butts off in there. Despite all of that working we still only ended up 9th on the day in our category. We retained our 7th overall ranking but the competition is getting tough. Hopefully as the singletrack increases in the stages we'll be able to make up some time on our competitors. Competitors or not, we're having a ball in the sun riding our bikes.