............. The Fine Grind: Dont forget the Pepper

My time in Montreal is comming to an end soon. I havnt booked any tickets or made any travel plans but its time to head out soon I think.

The main reason for me coming to Quebec to was to do the GP Charlevoux race in Baie St Paul. Luckily I hopped in with Stephen Keeping's BluBeri team and got a ride to the Baie and managed to stay with them in a cool old french house.

I haven't really seen Stephen since Canada Games in 2005, and to tell you the truth, I didn't really know the guy. Well, living in a house that exclusively speaks french tends to draw the two English speakers a bit closer. He's a pretty cool guy if you ask me. Its funny how some of our expressions are similar being from the Maritimes. Hearing a phase I would say kind of makes me laugh when everyone else in the room doesn't understand it.

The race went decent and terrible at the same time. I went into the time trial pretty old school in that I didn't have any aero gear, no race wheels, and simply a bike with 32spoked training wheels with a powertap without even the meager clip-on aero bars. Eddy Merckx style as one would say.

Over the time trial I lost 2 minutes to the winner, which put me in 41st place(of 68). With no TT gear it wasn't a bad result, and I was happy with it. A TT bike, and disc wheel does make quite a bit of difference.

The Crit was a sketchy as shit. It was a 1.1km, 4 corner course that went through the European style french town of Baie St Paul, and even gave us a tour of the sketchy church parking lot complete with hay bails and barricades that suddenly popped out into the path of the race.

The race was super fast, averaging 42km hour, which is pretty quick for a 4 corner short course. It hurt a lot more than last weeks crit only being 30 minutes long and showed that this guy needs some more crit time, both for the handling aspects, and fitness aspects. There was a crash on the 3rd last corner so it split the field and I came in about 10 seconds back.

All in all I was pretty happy. Really happy actually, I was sitting in 36th, only a couple minutes back going into the main event. The insanely hilly road race.

This was where my luck went down again. The first 10km I got a flat. No big deal, you get flats all the time. I grabbed the neutral wheel, and discovered it was the definition of a training wheel complete with 25c tire, and actually weighed more than a 32 spoke powertap wheel(which I flatted) No matter, and I popped it in the frame and took off for the pack.

Well, another thing I discovered was that Shimano Cassettes and old Sram chains don't work great together, so I had to fight this for the rest of the day as well.

I chased the pack for about 10 minutes where they approached the first climb. I got to about 20 ft from the pack, when I shifted into the 39 to climb the hill.

Of course I lost my chain.

So, in the end I ended up having to get off in the middle of the hill and put my chain back on. Anyone who this has happened to knows its hard to start a climb from a dead stop while chasing a pack, that you almost caught seconds earlier.

I chased and chased and chased but I simply couldn't re-group. So I was off the back.

Needless to say I was really really frustrated and had burned many matches trying to get back on. From here I rode the course for 70km, before being so frustrated with the chain/cassette combo I pulled out. Pullin out is one thing that I really really hate doing, and yes, there IS shame in it. But, at that point I didn't care at all.

This is how the season has been going. You question how far down you can be pushed before you simply don't have anything left to give, then all of a sudden a bright spot, which then is followed by more bad luck and bad happenings.

After the race I was pretty down. At the end of day I'm more mentally drained than anything else. This year has been pretty tough on the head that's for sure.

Today as I'm looking at the Powertap files, the numbers maybe don't seem that bad. The mood turned positive again today. I just have to plan my next move from here on out.

With that, here are random pictures from Montreal.