Canada Cup #2 - Tremblant

Well another voyage to la belle province and another great weekend of mountain biking action. It's a great atmosphere at Tremblant with tons of tourists in the village and a nice expo area of all the different race teams. I just wish for once they had the pedestrian gondola open to facilitate our laziness the day before the race. We had a nice condo right on the mountain so it was awesome to be able to roll over to the race start after lazing all morning. A post race shower was glorious as well.
I was pretty relaxed going into the race. I am pretty confident in my fitness right now and just focusing on staying more relaxed when I race and keeping a comfortable cadence. I believe it really has changed my racing for the better. I feel more in control not always straining against the pedals and it leaves me much more energy to flow the singletrack. The start was pretty good. I got a decent call up to the line and sat probably 4th row. It was pretty impressive how mostly everyone behaved themselves off the line and a major pileup for the most part was avoided. I got shoved around a little in the first 2min as usual. I guess I still have this crazy hangup about crashing and getting run over by 50 cyclists which usually means I don't take too many risks. There was a pretty big bottle neck 100m before the first singletrack on a bridge that had a gate 90% closed on it. Not too sure of the logic of this but that's the way things go sometimes in Quebec. A few riders had bad starts and made their way by me in the first lap but that was pretty much it for the race. In fact I gained a couple of those spots back courtesy of mechanicals. I opted for some more conservative lines through a couple spots in favour of keeping my bike in one piece for the duration of the 6 laps. Working my way forward seems to be a theme of mine and I'm sure my lap times were all pretty close. I am glad the race was 6 laps, pretty much the longer the better right now since I did so many big mountain bike rides while I was down south.
Anyways to wrap it up I placed 25th out of the 50 that finished and 21 racers DNF'ed. So really 25th out of 71 which I think is not too shabby. I'm looking forward to the Hardwood Canada Cup this weekend. I think the inconsistent performances of last year are a thing of the past and I'm back to my consistent ways. I'll post up some pics if I can find any.
Results Here
Over'n out.
Benno