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BC Bike Race: Back to British Columbia
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The BC Bike Race returns to British Columbia, Canada, for its second annual running from June 28 to July 4, 2008. The BC Bike race is one race in the still growing category of multi-day mountain bike stage races. It uses the popular two-person team format and boasts a large amount of singletrack through the rugged, Canadian backcountry.
Follow the adventures day by day from the vantage point of four racers on two teams including last year's winners Chris Eatough and Jeff Schalk (Trek / VW) and first-time competitors Jason Berry and Jon Posner (GFK Racing).
Schalk has been dominating the American 100 miler scene while Eatough is a proven champion at both 100 milers and 24 hours races. Film-maker Jason Berry and Jon Posner are long-time endurance enthusiasts and also two of the men behind the movie 24 Solo, which documented Eatough's bid for a seventh 24 hour World Championship Solo title.
The racers will take turns contributing diary entries during the event.
July 1, 2008
Stage 4: Another tough day
The winners on the day, stage four, were Kona. They seemed to be very motivated. One of their riders, Kris Sneddon is from this area and lives here. I think that made him energized, and he was comfortable on his home trails.
Team Kona, which also included Barry Wicks, set the pace from the beginning. There was a lot of singletrack today - a lot of up and down and rolling singletrack. It was somewhat flowy and smooth at times at times, somewhat rough at times and somewhat technical at times.
There were several other teams holding Kona's pace for the first half of the race, and then for the second half of the race, the gap started to grow over the Aussie Flight Centre team [of Tim Bennett and Adrian Jackson - ed.] and our Team Trek.
Just about the time Team Kona got a gap of about 20 seconds over the Aussie team and us, we got a flat tire.
It took us awhile to fix the flat. We actually had to change it twice as the first inner tube didn't work out. We probably lost about four minutes, and then we resumed chasing for about the last hour of the race.
Kona continued to ride well and won the stage. The Aussie team was second, the Costa Rican [La Ruta / Sho-Air / Economy Car Rental] team [of Manuel Prado and Marvin Campos - ed.] was third. We were fourth. The key element was that Kona beat us by over seven minutes today and they were only behind by two minutes going into the day, so they took over the lead.
What's been interesting it that there have been four different stage winners so far in the men's race - a different one each day. It was another tough day. The winning time was just over three hours.
We'll do it all again tomorrow.
Chris Eatough
Trek / VW
Trek / VW Team:
Jeff Schalk (USA), 34, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Chris Eatough (USA), 33, Oella, Maryland
GFK Racing Team:
Jason Berry (USA), 33, Arlington, Virginia
Jon Posner aka "Poz" (USA), 33, Catonsville, Maryland
