After a shoddy sleep in an overheated hotel room, I woke up, walked across the street to the bakery and bought a freshly baked croissant and cinnamon bun, then rolled down the street to the World Cup venue at Mont Saint Anne for my third day of demos here in Quebec. After a fairly quiet first show in the morning, I hung out, ate some healthier food, caught up with e-mails in the press room, and watched some of the DH preliminaries.

Second show was great fun, rode a couple hard lines, and because I purposely started the show early, the audience, and myself, had time to watch most of the women DH action. Congrats to my teammate Fionn Griffiths who took a 5th. Solid! She later snatched up a bronze in the 4X, she’s gotta be all smiles tonight.

I caught up with my buddy Marc Landry from FastTimes, he was shooting for Shimano, and I shadowed him for a while to catch all the best views of the mends DH, which was well under way at that point.  Close to tend, I had to race back to the bottom, but still saw the top few guys blow away the rest of the pack, with Minaar, Hill, and Atherton rounding out the top three (if my memory serves correct that is). Right at the same time I got a call from Caryn who had just finished her first mini-tri back home in BC, nice work love!

My 4:30 show was the busiest yet. For some reason it still lacked the magic from four years ago when I was here with my mentor and friend Robin Coope, but it was the kind of show that still left me smiling. I miss Robin’s dedication to his french rhetoric!

I rode my trials bike back to the hotel room, showered up with the intention to head back to the hill. But my hotel room was changed, and I had this beautiful room instead, with a large living room that just begged for a yoga session. So I decided to put on a yoga podcast from Eoin Finn (the Tragically Hips one), because when I flow naturally, I just don’t push myself as much, and after this practice I was sweating and tired and feeling incredible. At that point the weather was sketchy, and I ironically decided to watch the 4X live on freecaster from the hotel room, while multi-tasking with a few other ‘puter chores.

It’s raining a little right now, so with a full belly, a happily tired body, and a day of shows tomorrow, I’ll think I’ll skip the famous Mont Saint-Anne party (which goes until 4am), and catch a good night sleep.

 

Tags: Eoin Finn Podcast, Fionn Griffiths, Marc Landry, Mont Saint Anne, Robin Coope, Ryan Leech, World Cup

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Demos, Training, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.