The trip started on a Thursday night when I went down to Peachland Insurance to insure my baby blue 1994 dodge caravan. It looks as though it is a pedifile van, but I promise you it is not! It was $54 for 3 days, so I had to make sure it didn’t break down and I could make it home before the insurance ran out.

I was up early Friday and drove in Kelowna to pick up a fellow cyclist, Brain Bain from Calgary. We then started the trek to the beautiful Sunshine Coast. Our goal was to hit the 1:30 pm ferry so that we could get in a good pre-ride and then get on a good munch.

Did a quick top up on fuel at Whatcom rd. in Chiliwack, then we were on the final stretch to Horseshoe Bay. Once we arrived safely there we took a walk around and ran into a few people we know, Dan Skinner mainly, who always gives you a good laugh. Then we drove onto the ferry and make the quick 40 min boat ride to coast.

We picked up Devan on the ferry and drove to Casa de Sleep before we rode. Seb knows all the trails so he was our guide. The course was pretty sweet, about 25ish min laps with a good climb and a wicked descent. We picked our lines and all did our own pre-race day ride. Drove back to Seb’s house where his dad had a pasta feist and a half cooked up. We ate our selve’s silly then watched some family guy for some before bed humor.

Woke up and had some of Gibsons best coffee before heading to the race. We all had our own pre-race meal as well, which consisted of bread, oatmeal, fruit, eggs, coffee of  course and so on. Once we got to the hill I handed off my spare wheels and bottles to the coach for the feed zone. Then started the hour long warm up on the trainer. For this race I bumped up and race Pro/Elite instead of Junior to get in a good solid mtb effort before heading out for the Canada Cups. Everything went according to plan, ride hard and ride steady. I was always within the top 5, sometimes with some other riders and we all chased together, but some slowly fell off, or crashed and or got flats, So it was all left to me to try and bridge the 4 min gap to Stefan Wider(Rocky Mtn teammate) After that was near impossible I concentrated on maintaining my position and putting time into 4th place, at this point I didn’t realize but Marty Lazarski(Rocky Teammate also) was coming up hot on my heals after an early race flat. But I had enough time to roll into the finish in 3rd place. Which I was very happy about, considering there were about 5 guys who consistently place top-10 in the Canada Cups. All in all, great day, felt awesome and it was a good day for Rocky Mountain, we had 3 guy on the podium.

We quickly got the podium finished then headed for the ferry, we were told it would take 30 min to get the ferry, and the ferry was leaving in 25 min. We cruised, put that caravan to the test and got there with 5 min to spare. We did not speed at all! Trust me. Once we got to Vancouver we just cruised home slowly to save some gas and now we were in no rush.

Evan