It's been a week since Chico Racing's 24 Hours of Summer Solstice and I have finally recovered enough to share some thoughts on this excellent weekend.
The week leading up to the race was pretty wet and as you can see above there was high water all along the Humber River and Centreville Creek. Some camp sites were under water on Friday when we could move in, however our site was not one of them.
Mark, Jim and Andy showed up early to set up the trailer and shelter that would be our base for the next 48 hours.
Once the shelter was all set up it was time to relax before the start of the race.
Andy brought out his guitar and we wandered over to the Team Frenz campsite to enjoy a nice campfire and have a few pops.
Chico set up a great course for the 20th anniversary. The rain knocked out about a 2km section of singletrack, but that still left 15km of tough climbs, fast descents and great singletrack.
Unofficially someone counted 68 different climbs in those 15km, which made for a lap with no spots for rest. With that many climbs out on the course we were all spent at the end of our laps.
The night was an interesting time as it was most of us had never ridden at night before. We made it through with only one issue, Charles ran out of batters with about 3km of lap left. Always double check your batteries and never take your friend's word on battery life.
Emile Cabardos had the fastest lap for us, coming in just under an hour at 59 minutes. The rest of us put in very respectable times between 1:17 and 1:30.
Gotta give a shout out to Paul Kuno for bringing up the charcoal rotisserie bbq and Mark Palmer for supplying the chicken. It gave us a much needed boost of energy on the Saturday night.
Last but not least is Pete Crawley who not only had a broken chain on the last lap of the race, but also suffered the misfortune of racing in the only rain of the race.
A big thank you to Chico Racing for putting on this great race, and we can't wait to be back next year.
Also have to thank Mark Palmer for getting us registered and setting this whole weekend up for us. We wouldn't be a team without our Captain, so thank you for a great time.
