Last week-end was the Canada Cup & Quebec Cup at Mont Tremblant.
This is race footage of a complete lap around the cross-country track. It begins on the first lap and it cuts to the 3rd and last lap toward the end. It’s a long lap and the track is challenging. The conditions that day were particularly tricky as it rained overnight. There were many crashes and DNFs (look at 18:48 for a nasty crash right in front of me), so just getting to the finish was something to be proud of.
My race was going well, I made a few technical mistakes but I had a good pace overall and was looking at maybe a top 10. Unfortunately on the 3rd lap I had a technical: a pinch flat on the rear tire. I lost a little bit more than 10 min fixing it as I had trouble getting the tire off the rim. At least I was able to continue and finished the race in 1:43:46, which gave me a 20th place out of 43 riders. Removing the 10 min off my time would have put me in 13th place or something like that, which would have been totally awesome. So I’m happy with that!
I have nothing else to blame than myself really. I usually ride tubeless tires + stans on my tubeless rims because I don’t want to take any chances just to save 40$ or 40g. But there has been a mistake in my tire order, they were not UST tubeless, and I realized that only the Friday before the race. Should’ve checked my shit! And perhaps I should’ve mounted them tubeless anyway, because fixing a burped tire is still faster than changing a tube. That’s what I realized a few minutes before the race when I had my first pinch flat of the day while warming up! But it was too late to make the conversion at that point.
Anyways, a big thanks to the dude from #TeamDevinci who gave me another spare tube just before the start. It saved my race. These guys are awesome, they just help everybody with a Devinci bike and it’s the second time they save one of my race week-end.
So tomorrow is the race in Baie-St-Paul and it’s currently raining mud. Should be interesting!
Are you racing this week-end? What’s your tire setup for the race?