Team Fiat on the start

The day dawned mostly blue in Fernie on Sunday, and the collective sigh that was released by racers and organizers alike could probably be heard all the way at the finish like in Canmore. The race is tough enough without the extra toil and difficulty of slogging through Rocky Mountain weather.

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As a rookie at the TransRockies, and having met my partner the day before the race, I wanted everything to run nice and smooth. A sweet new bike, a little bit of training and lots of friends also at the race meant that the other pieces of the puzzle were in place, so really the only major thing that could affect the experience was bad weather. (Other than the inevitable bad tactical decisions.)

The first stage was supposed to be a little taster of the fun to come, 95km from Fernie to Blairmore, Alberta located at Crowsnest Pass. The profile said that there would be a total of 1330 metres of climbing on a course which was made up of a roughly even split between paved roads, gravel roads and trail.

The field begins to spread out on the uphill

Fernie really puts on a show for the racers. A street party the night before gave all the members of the travelling TransRockies family a chance to hang out a little before the flag was dropped. I could tell that there were some nerves and butterflies in the crowd as I had a really hard time finding anyone willing to have a pre-race beer. I thought that this was mountain biking!

The race rolled out at a leisurely pace behind Fernie’s vintage fire engine, before a 16km fire road climb started spreading the field out. I managed to follow the plan of not working too hard on the first day for about 90 minutes until the racing hit the fast gravel sections when I turned into an idiot and went ballistic for about 30 minutes—riding at 15 beats over my limit until I came to pieces and started apologizing to my partner who was nearly killed by my foolishness. Luckily for my pride, I was far from the only one making the same mistake.

What goes up…

It took both of us at least an our to get our head and legs back in working order but once we did, we were able to start working through the field a little bit and ride with some friends who were riding in the same part of the field.

We were a little surprised leaving the second feed zone when my altimeter showed that our stated climbing total had been reached, but the trail kept going up very steeply. It was a good thing that this was this was a really fun section of the course with rolling technical climbs and a couple of screaming fast descents.

We dragged ourselves into in the finish chastened by the goof-ups and promising ourselves that tomorrow would be different. Oh yeah, and while the distance was dead-on, our total climbing was over 1800 metres. Hopefully the elevation numbers will a little more dead-on tomorrow.