BC RACE Stage 6

Day 6
The town of Squamish was the setting for what many had said would be the crunch of the BC race. This stage is a combination of 2 separate cross country races the Test of Metal and the Gearjammer. The Test of Metal is widely regarded in Canada as the unofficial MTB Championship of the World, the winner of this one day race held in May every year must be an excellent mountain bike rider, Max Plaxton won the race just before the BC Race started this year and along with his partner Andreas Hestler managed to win the stage as well. Today we made it through without any problems but I was really feeling the effects of only 4 hours sleep the night before. After the ferry trip back from the Sunshine coast I had gone into Vancouver for a couple hours before trying to head up to Squamish. A propane leak on the Whistler Highway closed the road until 1 a.m. so what should have been a big nights sleep turned into a stressful evening instead. Our plan was to ride smoothly and pick up the pace on the long logging road climb about halfway through the race,a couple times I had to tell Yoshi to back off a bit and even though we managed to maintain our position we could have done a bit more with this super hard 65 kilometer course today.
A big thanks goes out to the mechanics who worked until 3 or 4 a.m. every night repairing racers bikes, my bike spent the night before the 6th stage in their hands as I had manged to destroy a chainring and chain on the 5th stage. Due to my traveling problems I didn't have a chance to check the bike out at all before the stage start, I pretty well walked up to the service area 10 minutes before the start of the race, begged them to let me "pay you later" and lined up at the start line. The bike was perfect right from the word go and after the race when I paid up I also gave them my thanks. There is a lot that goes into putting a 7 day stage race together, somebody was taking my tent down and putting it up again every night, somebody else was making me breakfast and dinner everyday, when you think there is about 600 people traveling along within the race. A big shower truck was always near the campsite, I never had to wait more than 10 minutes to get clean. The organizers of the race made a few mistakes but were always quick to take the blame and make the corrections, very impressive group.