Blocks Cycle XC8 2008, Best One Yet...Until Next Year...

This past weekend the Offroad Syndicate hosted the 4th XC8 Endurance race. I have been part of the Organizing crew for all of them, and it has been a great time. The weekend always comes and goes in a flash, but it's always the most fun I have at a mountain bike event.

The work that goes into putting on this event is quite allot, but the people who come out and race totally make up for all the long hours in the 4 days surrounding it. Seeing all the people show up on Friday night camping and hanging out around the bonfire. The energy just flows into your body and it seems to just keep going all weekend. I tend to not eat enough over the whole weekend because I'm always busy doing something whether it's racing or doing some sort of organizer duty, so this extra energy comes in very handy.

This year we had 123 racers show up! WOW we weren't expecting that many. Last year we had 82, we were hoping to hit 100 and we totally exceeded that which is great. We get allot of out of province racers which is very cool. It is so neat to see some new faces come to our province and race against. We get allot of returning racers who have been to a few XC8's before and it is great to see those people again. We strive to make our event better every year and hopefully they keep coming back to see the improvements. It makes everything seem so worthwhile.

This year we upped the ante on the course design, and made it more challenging. The feedback was a mixed bag. I talked to quite a few racers and got responses from "the course was way harder than last year and i loved it" to "Man, that was so hard it wasn't even fun". The first few kilometres were pretty challenging to the average cyclist and after a few hours it would hurt. Now mountain bike racing usually hurts anyway and the best racers know that if they are hurting so is the opposition and whoever can handle it longer will usually win. If you are out for a good fun time and not into turning yourself inside out just to ride the racecourse I can see how after 4 hours of riding this years course would be torture. We are already planning next years racecourse and look for it to be a very fun and challenging course that everyone will love for different reasons. It wont be a torture fest and every lap will be a s fun as the previous one.

I would like to say thanks to all the people who came out to our race this year, they came from Winnipeg to Nelson BC and pretty much everywhere in between! Kudos has to go out to Jay for doing so much behind the scene work on this yearly project. The race would not be even close to what it is with out all the preliminary things he does. His wife Cheryl who helps him out and ALL DAY long runs the timing at the start/finish line. That's an endurance feat in itself! Then there is Darcy from Blocks Cycle who always manages to find some cool prizes for us to give away and brings tons of help for during the race. He even brought out some quads for us to use during the weekend which was a HUGE help. Blocks Cycle and Norco are the title sponsor for this race and allow us to host such a cool race. Big thanks goes out to them. Jeremy built a timing system from scratch last year which is uber cool. It works like clockwork (pardon the pun) It makes the whole timing of the race a breeze. Without it there would be catastrophic errors in times and lap counting especially with over 100 racers. Kris, Dean, Jeremy, Jay, Cheryl and I all work together to host this event and are super stoked that everyone came out this year to make it a success.

Look for next years race to be even bigger and better than this years. Until then I need to train more, I took a beating from this race. See you next year!