Red Truck – Garneau p/b Easton Cyclocross Team becomes Canada’s most high-caliber cyclocross team and one of the top teams in North America.
Viewing entries in
2015
Once at the race it’s always fun finding the right street to drive down to get to team alley. Of course we got this horribly wrong, pleading with the officials to move barriers as we were stuck on a street dead ending onto the crit course. With the Cat 3 race starting only the ninja-esques back up skills of Geordie saved us. We show parked the van and set up with time to spare.
Sunday morning at 7:30, usually the last thing I'd be up early inflating my tires for is suffering for 30 minutes straight up a mountain. In August every year though, local club Glotman Simpson Cycling puts on a fundraising challenge race, The Cypress Hillclimb Challenge, to raise money for Pancreatic Cancer Research. So last week Craig and I found ourselves up while the air was still cool suiting up to head up the mountain.
Racing BC Superweek is always a highlight of any BC racer's year. Racing with giant crowds in your hometown areas is amazing, having almost the entire Vancouver cycling community out to watch these big crits makes you feel the weight BC and Vancouver racing carries, and getting to throw ourselves in with the 'Big Boys' of North American crit and road racing is a chance to show off our sponsors and ourselves as athletes. That being said, it goes without saying that Superweek is a showcase for our team.
Gastown Grand Prix is arguably the marquee event of BC Superweek. All the other races are awesome – but Gastown has the biggest crowds, the biggest field, and the biggest prize purse. For us at Trek-Red Truck Racing, it also has the biggest sponsor turn out, giving us a great opportunity to show off our racing skills in front of those that support us.
Race reports often seem to contain a lot of "rah rah, go team!" mentality and miss out on the nuances that make cycling the beautiful sport that it is. We sometime joke that to win a bike race you just need to push on the pedals harder than everyone else. There's an element of truth in that, but it captures only a tiny essence of the complex mixture of attributes needed to be a good criterium racer.
The 2015 Pan American Games were my first ever international games. They wrapped up this past Sunday in Toronto and I managed to come away with a gold and bronze. My main focus for the games and why I was selected to the Pan Am team was the team pursuit on the track. We knew going into the event that the Americans, with a revamped team, would probably be our biggest threat and come out with a good ride to put pressure on us.
A few years ago, the idea of Ironman was hatched on the US Xterra Pro Series Circuit with my good friend Danelle Kabush. As we both are born in 1975, I suggested we do something special on our 40th year on the planet. I remember saying, "Let's go do that Ironman race in Kona". She laughed.
"Uh, Brandi, you have to qualify for that race."
The last race in the Tour de Delta is the UCI road race around the suburbs of Tsawassen. This year the course had changed, leaving a few parties confused, but ended up making it more exciting for the spectators as they were able to see the racers pass by the start/finish twice a lap.
Gastown is the biggest race of the year for the Trek - Red Truck team sponsors, and is a key event for most of the riders, allowing them to showcase their sport in front of a hometown crowd of friends, family, and sponsors.
If you follow this blog at all, you may have read previously that fellow TRT-er Leah Guloien and I came up with the brilliant idea of doing the Leadville 100 MTB race this year. At the same time that we were making these good decisions back in January, I also decided that it would be a good idea to register for Test of Metal – why not do at least two mountain bike races before Leadville right?
I came into this season with a few goals on my list of races this year. The provincial road race being one of particular importance to me. Really though this race was a carry on of my targets from last year.
The Cameron Law Cycling Series is always an exciting race for Trek Red Truck. Close to home in beautiful Victoria, there’s sure to be strong competition, big crowds, and the opportunity to show what our team is made of. 2015 was no exception!
A couple weekends ago saw the three juniors of Trek Red Truck head out to Penticton to race the Junior Provincial Championships. The racing got kicked off bright and early Saturday morning with a time trial of 22km for the girls and the same for the boys. The course was around Summerland in a beauty location.
For the men’s team, the Sea Otter Classic was the first ‘real’ race of the season. No disrespect to the mixture of spring series races that some of the guys took in before that, but Sea Otter was the first time we had a full squad out, had full race support from the dynamic duo of Steve and Evan, and the first time we had competed with racers outside of our little British Columbian bubble.
After a great week of hard training at the legendary Santa Rosa camp, some of the members of the TRT race team headed down to Wenatchee, Washington to take park in the “Tour de Bloom” a 3 stage/2 day race, featuring a mass start hill climb, a twilight downtown crit and, a long 165 km RR in the around the beautiful town of Waterville.
Arriving at the Mazda Raceway at Leguna Seca for Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, California, was like stepping into a festival of bikes, combining all elements of the sport from racing fat and skinny tires to an expo stacked with every bike manufacturer and product available! The environment was buzzing with energy as vendors, campers and athletes set up for a jam-packed weekend of everything bike related!
When I was deciding what to do for the 2015 cycling season, one of my biggest goals was to have fun on the bike. For some reason that translated into finding a new challenge – tackling the Leadville Trail 100. I not only convinced myself that this would be fun – but I also convinced fellow Trek-Red Truck-er Leah Guloien that a 100-mile mountain bike race at altitude would be a great idea.
Each and every year Spring Series gets labeled as "just training" however it offers some of the hardest fought racing all season long. Trek Red Truck showed up to the fight!
No matter how well training goes over the winter, training just never seems to be the same as racing. In Vancouver, Spring Series provides a great opportunity to get a little racing in the legs before heading to bigger races like Redlands. This year, however, the stars aligned allowing me to kick the 2015 season off a little earlier in New Zealand.