Dave’s Bike Adventures

WOW!  That was 7 long, intense, insane, adrenalin-filled days of racing bikes in the Canadian Rockies!

It all started last fall driving back from the Swank 65 race in Pisgah.  Alex asked if I’d consider doing an MTB stage race.  Sounds like fun I said.  Let’s see, there’s the TransRockies, La Ruta, and the BC Bike Race (others too but that would require traveling to Europe or Africa!).  Well we decided on the TransRockies and the rest is history!

TransRockies is a 7 day mountain bike stage race in the Canadian Rocky mountains that covers about 350 miles in the course of the week.  It has grown steadily in popularity and this year 300 teams of 2 from 27 countries converged on Panorama Mountain Village in British Columbia for the 2008 edition of the race.  While there were some who were in it to finish, I was surprised at the number of high caliber, serious racers that were there to give it their all and really compete.  It made for a lot of thrilling days on the bike.

My partner Alex and I went into the event with racing in mind but weren’t sure how well we would stack up against such a strong field.  And neither of us had done a 7 day race before - so we were in uncharted territory in terms of effort, recovery, fueling, etc.

Well I’m happy to say we made it with both the bikes and bodies in one piece.  We even put in a respectable showing - while we flirted as high as 7th place in the 80+ men category GC, we ended up 16th out of 69 teams.  Not bad at all I thought.

I brought the camera most days and I’ll be writing up details on each stage - stay tuned for that in the coming days - just getting up some initial info at this point.  But here are a few of the highlights:

• Awesome weather overall but mother nature did throw some hail and snow our way to make stage 1 even more epic!
• Lots of fun technical descents including a loose, gnarly 1.5 km long rock garden downhill at the end of stage 5 - I was lovin’ that part!
• Super fast dirt road descents where we hit 75 km/h
• Running a pace line on dirt roads with other teams you don’t  know (who only spoke broken English) at 50 km/h
• Singletrack perched on the ridges of a gorge overlooking beautiful emerald green rivers
• Enough glacier-fed creek crossings on stage 4 to keep the toes numb for a while
• Enough hike-a-bike to make you feel like a genuine pack mule as you carried your bike up things like … oh say an avalanche chute!
• Enough climbing to make the quads scream for mercy every day!  17623 meters … 57818 feet … that’s almost 11 miles of vertical !!!
• Eating crazy amounts of (great) food each day then burning it all off (and more) each day on the bike.  Thanks to the TR crew - the food was awesome!

Before …

(looking all rested and ready to take on the race just before the start of stage 1)

… And After

(not looking too shabby, eh?)