On to Bromont

It's hard to get a good picture of the waterfall. Believe me, though. It's impressive!

Melissa and I headed out of Mont Sainte Anne to Bromont. Along the way we stopped at the highest waterfall in Canada (not the BIGGEST, that'd be Niagra, but it's the highest). It's just outside of Quebec City, and it's pretty impressive!

From there we headed to our friend's house in Bromont..."The Paradise B&B". This is what we named their amazing house on Mount Brome. They are wonderful hosts with a house that made it really nice to "come home" after practice and racing!

Ahh, heavenly!

One of the best parts of Bromont is the Musee du Chocalat! I'm not the biggest fan of chocolate, but this place not only has amazing chocolate, it has wonderful and pretty darn inexpensive food! We ate there three times. haha :)

Cool Jenga-like Building in Montreal

Old Town Montreal...sometimes I wish I could just lie down in the middle of the street and throw a tantrum, haha!

We all headed into Montreal for dinner one night and Gab and Claudine gave us the short version of the grand tour of the city. It's a cool place! Apparently the night life is awesome, so we'll have to go back some time when we can actually check it out!

I was having a really bad week with some personal stuff at the beginning of the week and just couldn't get my head on straight to ride my bike. After walking the DH course and realizing that I didn't remember half of what I'd just walked down because I was thinking of other things, I decided it would be in my best interest to NOT race down the gnarly off camber rock slab course, especially since it was forecasted to rain, a lot!

The 4x track in Bromont is super fun and really long! The first straight is FAST!! It seems like this is the moral of all of my stories, but I didn't have a good qualifier...gonna work on this for World's, for sure!!! I ended up with Melissa, Mio, and Joanna in the first heat. Jo got a good gate and pushed me way far to the left on the track, leaving me with little in the way of options. Coming into the rock garden, I found myself in no mans land where I had never ridden before...and for good reason! The rocks were HUGE! After that mishap, I was way behind and just finished out the heat and went on to cheering. The highlight of the 4x racing that evening was the young American National Champ, Mitch Ropelato! I've gotten to know this kid fairly well at the races this summer, and he's not only a super talented, fast ripper, but he's a super nice kid, too! It's gonna be a lot of fun to watch him race 4x and DH at World Champs!!

After the racing was over, we all washed the mud out of our hair and got a bit dolled up and headed to the party with the hopes that it would be better than it had been the year before! It didn't disappoint! There was a lot of dancing, some beer drinking, some French-German lessons (haha), and a lost driver's license (well, stolen, actually, but that's just semantics when you don't have it the next day!). Good times, good times!

Mont Sainte Anne World Cup

Melissa, Me, Darian, and Jackie reping the USA!!

Mont Sainte Anne puts on one of the best World Cup races all season. I think the venue and racing is better at Fort William, but Gestev (the race promoter) is doing something right!!! All race promoters should come to this race and take notes!

The 4x track is awesome! Phil rebuilt the course trying to get it all sorted out for World Champs next year, and he made massive really good improvements. I had so much fun riding the track! I got a flat tyre in qualies, which was a real bummer, but that's how it goes. In the first round racing I had a gate of 3 with Fee and Mio. I entered one of the berms faster than I had previously trying to anticipate anywhere to pass and the next thing I knew... I was on my head with the wind completely knocked out of me! It took me 2-3 minutes to sort my breathing out. :( I got up, with my broken and bouncing around peak and finished...just because the jumps were so much fun that I wanted to ride them again!

The DH track is gnarly!! It is long, fast, bumpy, some tech stuff in the woods and some jumps. I had a hard time holding on! I was feeling good in the upper woods section until the very end. I crashed and just couldn't get it back together after that. It was fun to get on that track, though. I've walked it when I've been in MSA doing 4x in the past and have always wanted to give it a go, so I'm glad I raced!

US National Champs

Ummmmm, this sign was on the course well after the 50 foot gap jump...maybe they need to order some more signs! haha

The National Champs ended up being pretty disappointing for me. My tailbone was still pretty unstable and healing up, but I decided to race anyway. It's not very often that the National Champs race is only 2.5 hours away!

I headed up to Sol Vista on Wednesday afternoon to get some course walks in before practice started on Thursday. The DH track was fresh cut...not even cut in some spots. There were huge doubles at the end of the course that used up a lot of valuable elevation real estate. The 4x track was pretty long and was raw! I'm not even going to go into the "Pro" start gate/first straight, as once I got there I saw it and instantly realized that it was dumb. I'm not trying to take the piss at the Sol Vista boys for their effort in progressing the sport, but it is 4x racing, and whether they like it or not, gate starts are and should have an importance in the race. A good course is one that is designed in such a way that just because you have a good gate start, it doesn't guarantee that you'll win the race.

Anyway...I rode pretty tenatively all weekend, and it showed! :( I qualified really poorly for 4x but then I had some really good gates and was riding really well until Jackie jumped into me on a section of the course that was only wide enough for 1 person, not too. We both went down, and my bike was pretty well jacked when I got up and tried to ride it after all of that. Bummer. DH was fun to ride, but I had no intentions of doing the big jumps...wasn't feeling it, so that pretty much wrote me out of the equation to do well. I ended up crashing and breaking my brake in the finals for a DNF. I hate DNFing!

That's all.

The Label Goes on the Outside!

You know, sometimes I try and multitask when I really need to focus my attention. One would think that after many, many years of getting dressed in the morning, you might be able to, at least mentally, multitask whilst putting clothes on. Turns out, I can't. At least once a week, I manage to put my underwear, pants, panties, knickers, whatever the hell you want to call them, on inside out. At least I have a giggle to myself every time I realize that I've done it again. Ah, well, that's probably too much information for most of you, but sometimes you've just got to share those little pieces of personal comedy. :)

There and Back Again

Well, I returned to Boulder, albeit an hour after we were supposed to get here, via British Airways on Tuesday evening. I've never had such a lucky check-in experience as I did at the London Heathrow airport. My friend Bernard dropped me off with all of my stuff, after I spent the whole morning complaining about how I couldn't get to all fit into my bags and boxes (got it all to fit in the end!) and that I was going to get charged so much in excess baggage fees (both bags were at least 27 kgs and I had two bikes, neither of which were 23 kgs, either). I'm not going to lie, I did do a quick sweep of my options of people to check-in with, and the guy I chose did look like the one to be most easily charmed with a big smile! haha I rolled up to his counter with the biggest smile I could muster and was as polite as I could be. In the end, I didn't pay for anything that was overweight, nor did I pay for either of my bikes! Not bad, not bad. It gets better though! I mention to the guy about my sore bum and that I've gotten stuck with a middle seat, and I wonder if he could possibly find me a window seat for the 10 hour flight home. He says he'll see what he can do, but the flight is full, so no promises. In the end, the guy got me upgraded to business class, and when I got on the plane a family wanted to all be next to each other, so I got the window seat that I wanted, too! It was a good day at the airport. I haven't been able to say that very many times!! :)

I've been back for a couple of days now (actually wish I'd never left, though!!), and I'm just trying to get my life all sorted out with school stuff, bike stuff (new hardtail arrived in my absence...more on that soon. it's sweet!), new tyre sponsor, going to Dr's to figure out my broken bum and whether I can race next week, etc...Not a lot to write home about, but I'll have a couple of updates in the near future!