Big Bikes

MTB - Coupe Canada Cup, Can (1/2) Mt. Tremblant, Quebec

Above Photo: Packed like a ten year old running away from home. The Honda Fit is magical, like Baba Yaga's Hut - much larger on the inside than it is on the outside (that and it moves around on two pair of dancing chicken legs). The completely senile yet helpful old woman. You know you're in Canada when the Dunkin Donuts become Tim Horton's and the Doritos flavors become even grosser and weirder.

I am a genius...totally forgot that, although I didn't work today, that it was still an effective blog-work-day. So I give you this meager offering of a half (assed) post. More tomorrow I swear.

After last Sunday’s fiasco I was actually looking for an out on this one. When I saw I was scheduled to work this weekend and went up to the head office at The Work to remind Le Boss (Sorry, I guess all this time I’m spending in Quebec is rubbing off on me) that I was supposed to be off, I half-hoped that I would be implored to work. Then when Miriam woke up with Strep Throat and a fractured wrist, I half-hoped that I too would come down with Strep Throat and a fractured wrist. She told me that fractured wrists aren’t contagious but that I could catch one from trying to be as wicked hardcore as she is on the mountain bike.

Since all the up and coming Pros read this thing looking for hot training tips, allow me to describe my meticulous two nights prior to the race regime.

1. Stay up until 1AM watching Angel re-runs and drinking all the beers in the house.


Pretty simple, anyone can stick to a plan like that.

"Anybody can be a non drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth"

-Henry Chinaski

In the morning Linnea picked me up and we headed up to Nashua New Hampshire. She needed to drop off some Edge rims to be built up by Justin Spinelli. I had thrown our time-line off by insisting on stopping first for Ice Coffee then for muffins. I bought what I thought was a Banana Nut Muffin from Whole Foods, only to find, to my horror, that it was indeed a Bran Muffin. Vile thing! I haven’t seen any trailers for the newest Terminator Film, but I’m pretty sure it involves a Killer-Death-Robot being sent back in time to the 80’s to hunt down and Kill to Death whoever invented the fucking Bran Muffin.

When we got to Spinelli’s house, he wasn’t there. We rang the bell and walked around the outside of house, wondering if we were even in the right place. I called Spinelli’s good buddy Craig, to ask him if we were actually in the right spot.

“Craig, we’re in Nashua, at Justin’s house, we think, it looks like it’s one house, but maybe two apartments, but they back up to separate streets…”.

“That sounds insane…but good luck”.

Turns out his elderly downstairs neighbor was home, she let us in and instructed us to leave the wheel box at the top of the stairs with a note.

“And I don’t need to know what’s in the package…all I know is that he’s a fine gentleman. Oh my grandson just graduated, I’m so proud, he was just came to visit, you just missed him…”.

She was immensely helpful.

Due to my prima donna-muffin-antics, the stop at Spinelli's, and our stop for awesome food at Stone Soup in Burlington, VT (again, my brilliant idea, but we did see MTB celeb Lea Davison walking around which was cool), we landed squarely in Montreal rush hour traffic. It was serious. All told it took us nearly eight hours or something to get to Tremblant. We showed up just in time for dinner, but unfortunately way too late for a preride or even a spin.

And with that nail-biting cliffhanger I leave off for today, like I said at the top, more tomorrow.