Rider update

After the Raid race on Saturday a few of us packed up our friends van and headed across the U.S Border to ride some of the Kingdom trails network.  These tracks were said to be some of best America has to offer so were very keen to get amongst this iconic mountain biking park!
The network is very similar to New Zealands Rotorua version with a 100km of track (not that we rode it all!) so while the body was still a bit tired from the day before the eyes lit up once we started to really get into the heart of the forest.  Huge big sweepers flowing up and down through the sides of the valley floors sure brought a smile to the dial!
The best thing was that it was all single track and all the work up sure got rewarded with the down, good for the technical speed work negotiating the trails with all the roots and it made for a neat 2 and half hour ride.  A full suspension 29er would be the ideal bike for this sort of work!
Tuesday also saw Mat and I off on another trip roughly an hour out of Sherbrooke to East Hereford very close to the border.  

We parked up behind the local villages church and headed off down the road to start climbing our way up into the forest and the first 4wd track.  The sharp smell of the pine trees was superb!  This followed onto a single track climb that we knew we would be finishing our ride on so we quickly thought this was going to be a very fast and fun finisher to our ride after we had completed our loop.
As we rode deeper into the forest it became more rooty with a few natural rock gardens scattered here and there which made for some good fun.  After a short open climb to reach our half way we re-entered the forest and it was all undulating but mostly downhill to the end.   We had a blast as the tracks became even faster especially that final section!  Neat big bermed corners and fast flowing singletrack took us back onto the road where Mat had managed to get a puncture just coming off the hill!  Never mind, I went and got the car, picked him up and we were on our way, another excellent trail ride!
Last Wednesday I have raced in a local club event just around the corner from our accommodation in our training forest.  The course was a short 5 lap trace but highly intensive and was tight and technical with many trees roots.  Even better it had been wet also (but we had been training here so we were familiar with this riding style) so I had to be on my game with the 7pm start.  I raced again last night against some keen club riders and had a very solid training with that added bonus of coming across the line first!
This weekend we have been pushing to see if we can race in the Canadian National Championships so fingers crossed they let us race.  It will be our final hit out before the World Cups starting next weekend which I'm looking forward to with much excitement!