[Show as slideshow]

Other than that the weather hasn’t been the best so riding has been down to a minimum. Once my mouth is healed from this surgery I’ll back on the bike with some new content to upload. Ciao until then.

I was riding a bike that was kindly donated to me, which I think was a 2003 Kona Jake cyclocross bike. I had added slick tires and fenders, and the bike proved to be reliable and efficient. Over the course of the year I owned the Kona I covered over 4000 km. What I didn’t like however was the ageing drive train and the fact that the brakes didn’t work. Slowly I started thinking I should purchase a new commuter bike. I was thinking I’d make the effort to ride as much through the winter as possible and for that to happened I’d need some half decent brakes. As far as I’m concerned rim brakes don’t work, so I was convinced I needed disc brakes. A large portion of my commute is through the flats of Richmond, which is notoriously windy. As such I wanted drop bars so when it was windy I’d be able to hunker down and get out of the wind as much as possible. After some research online I was tossed between the following two bikes:

1. 2012 Specialized Crux Comp Disc
2. 2012 Norco CCX 2

The irrational side of me really wanted the Crux. It was a carbon frame, and had nicer bits. It was also near double the price of the CCX. Since I was just using this bike as a tool to get to work and back I thought I’d get the sensible choice and purchase the CCX. So far I’ve put in 500 happy kilometres on the CCX and thoroughly enjoying it. The brakes are a vast improvement over rim brakes, the drive is new and crisp, and the frame is much more comfortable than the old Kona.

Funnily enough this now means that I started 2011 with a Trek Session 88, Santa Cruz Nomad and Kona Jake, and end 2011 with a straight flush of Norcos; an Aurum, a Range and a CCX 2. To that I couldn’t be happier.

Specialized DH Tire Review on NSMB.com

Mt Washington 2011 Provincials Results

A nice movie was put together of the race and can be seen here (I make an appearance at 4:04): http://www.pinkbike.com/video/213111/

Mother Nature didn’t really want to co-operate, and even though only a few millimeters of precip. were forecast, it rained all week-end. On the Saturday I used a set of Specialized Clutch tires and was having a ton of fun sliding down the track, but as the day wore on, and the rain kept falling, the track got steadily muddier. I left the mud spikes at home as I thought there’d be no way I’d ever need to use mud tires at Bear. Wrong. Very wrong.

I mounted the mud spikes on the bike on Sunday morning, and got to the race site early so I could get a good number of practice runs. Lots of racers were complaining about the conditions, but with the cut mud spikes on, I was having loads of fun. Some sections were getting really slippery, but I was still riding at good speed and  hitting all the jumps right through till the end of practice.

Pinning it into the showboat jumps during practice. Photo by: Dave Mackie

I was really looking forward to my race run all day. I lined up in the start gate and got ready to drop in. Everything felt right. I’d ridden really well all week-end and was certain I was capable of throwing down a strong run. I left the start gate pinned. I railed all my lines through the top section, and held great speed through the upper techy sections. As I traversed across the first flat the bike felt like it was rolling really slowly. I figured it was the mud, dug deep and pedalled hard. While the mud was thick, and slow, my progress was being thwarted by a tire that was swiftly going flat. Balls. I barely put a wheel wrong all week-end, have no flats, and I flat in my race run, in 3 inches of mud … how? Naturally I was gutted. Now I’m more motivated than ever!

The best looking team at Wades Excellent Adventure by a margin

So the Polartec Team John Henry Bikes powered by ethical bean team was formed for Wades Excellent Adventure. We all had matching fancy new jerseys (except Megan because we didn’t have a jersey that fit her even close) and looked mostly professional and stuff. We even had a support team, possibly the best support team ever, in Katie and Spencer. Bike wise we were on a mixed bag. Representing the shorter travel was Megan was on a Norco Phaser, Ian was on a Stump Jumper 29er and Sean was on a Specialized Epic. Representing for the long travel bikes was Rob was on his Turner RFX and myself on a lowered and slackened Norco Range.

Ultimately 10:30 … or 10:45 came around and the race was off. The filthy downhillers; Rob and I lead the charge. Our first lap was to be down Executioner into Dream Weaver. Most of us a crash or two … and then there was Sean who seemed unusually attracted to the ground. As a team we were making good time, and having a great time together. We finished lap 1 and headed back up Mt. Highway for lap 2.

Pedalling up for the first lap at Wades Excellent Adventure. It appears as though I'm enjoying myself while pedalling uphill ... weird.

Lap 2 was to be Seventh Secret into Leopard into Crinkum. None of us bothered to read the fine print that said exit at the 3rd switchback. Unfortunately Megan had a crash that taco’d her rear wheel. We tried to fix it as best we could, but couldn’t get her tubeless tire to re-inflate. She walked out to the transition area in the hopes that she could fix it and we’d meet her for the next lap. Ian went ahead while Rob, Sean and I helped Megan out. Rob, Sean and I went charging off after Ian. The turn out to the third switch back wasn’t marked terribly well (which we weren’t expecting as we didn’t read the card properly), we were having loads of fun riding, and as a result rode all of Crinkum down to the first switchback. We soon found some more trails markings, so thought we were totally on the right track. We did some XC loop that dumped us back on Mt. Highway and pedalled back up to Ladies Only. At the third switch back was Ian, who informed us that we’d just done an extra half lap. Dammit. And that XC loop we did … we did backwards adding even more vertical to our ride. Double dammit.

We soon got back up to Ladies Only. Had a good descent down. Picked up Megan in the transition area (who was now riding her boys larger Rocky Mountain XC bike), and pedaled up to Bobsled for our final lap down. We all had a laugh riding down Bobsled as a group. We finished after 3 and a half hours of gruelling riding with large grins on all our faces. We were greeted at the finish by Katie and Spencer who had cold Red Racers waiting for us. Legend.

I recorded the entire ride on my iPhone GPS and uploaded it, which can be found here.

Cheers to the team for an awesome day out. I’m looking forward to next year already.

Going back a few weeks I had an opportunity to review the new Turner DHR. You can check out the review here.

Other than that I got up to Whistler Bike Park this past week-end for the first time this year. The whole gong show was in attendance with some epic trains including the Hoff, Emo, Angry Dad, Dodsy and Bryson. The trails were mostly in great shape and everyone was ripping. Cheers for an awesome day boys.

On the ferry over to the Olympic Peninsula. Some delinquents had defaced this map ... and we thought it was rather funny

I had raced in Port Angeles back in 2009 and was impressed with the event organization, the course is a blast to ride, and the competition is always strong.

For the very reasonable price of $65 you get three days of shuttles. So we took the day off work and arrived at the race site at 1pm on Friday. We geared up and got out on the race course. I loved the entire race course and had a perm-grin all my face from the very first run. The track had a good mix of features with a wicked flow from top to bottom. Speeds were high, minimal pedalling and lots of corners to rail. Even though we showed up an hour after practice had started we got in 9 fun filled runs. We headed back to the hotel, got cleaned up, and had some drinks. After dinner at a local Mexican restaurant we hit some sketchy bars. It was my birthday so some celebration was in order. For the record, if you’re single and looking for a hot place to pick up someone I’d fully not recommend Port Angeles.

It was Mexican food for dinner, and thankfully their cooking was better than their spelling

One of the interesting ideas behind the racing scene in Port Angeles is that the Pro and Cat 1 categories race on one track, and the Cat 2 and Cat 3 categories race on another track. Fridays practice was open for all categories. However for Saturday things get split up even further. For the morning the Cat 1′s and Cat 3′s practice. For the afternoon the Pros and Cat 2′s practice. This means that you very rarely run across a slower rider, and slower riders don’t have to ride all day fearing they’re going to get stream-rolled by some one that is barrelling down the course. This meant we had no good reason to get up early, so we all slept in, and meandered our way to the race site. We got in a good walk down the course, and got ready for practice.