Apparently when bike mechanics and amateur racers Leigh and Carrie arrived in Canada a couple of years back, they were, like Janine and I, very definitely XC riders (ie the wheels stay in contact with the ground pretty much all of the time). The longer they stayed the further towards the dark side they rode, ending up competitive in some pretty scary, armor-mandatory race disciplines. After our second morning riding big bikes in Whistler's chairlift-enabled (or gravity-assisted, as they say) Bike Park, we were starting to see how that could happen.
Not unusually, we'd arisen later than planned and then fluffed around a bit before heading in to the village. Tim's a regular in the Bike Park, and he set off up the chairlift as we made a bee-line for the Trek demo tent, where we collected a pair of Scratches. The people manning the stand were really cool (Hi Dex and Scott and very-pregnant lady and French-speaking woman!), and between gas-bagging and brake-swapping, Tim was arriving back at the Boneyard chairlift queue after his first downhill run at the same time we got there.
Having a local guide is always a good thing, although we were mildly concerned that he'd find riding with us would be like riding with an anchor. The nature of downhill riding means that you need to keep a certain distance between riders though, and regrouping occurs at intervals, at appropriate stop locations, so really the impact of riding with us was long rests between sections of easier-than-normal trails. Nene and I had a ball. B-Line to Smoke and Mirrors to Monkey Hands. Lots of long, flat structures on Smoke and Mirrors, which continued our "ladder-bridge" acclimatisation, and our first Bike Park black (ie advanced) run on Monkey Hands, which actually turned out to be an exercise in unrealised trepidation more than anything else, as we rode the whole thing trying to mentally prepare for the scary black-diamond-warranting stuff to materialse round every corner. It never did.
Back at the chairlift, we successfully used our media passes to jump the now-significant queue using the athlete priority lane, and were soon blasting down B-Line, with growing strength and growing confidence in the air*. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and we didn't want to stop, or to give the bikes back. As people keep telling us, gravity-assisted riding is addictive and seductive, and it'll be interesting to see whether there's a change in the riding timbre for us over time, or whether Nene's determination to earn downhills by riding up first holds firm.
Still, time was ticking on, and it was nearly cheese-rolling o'clock - high time we got our running shoes on and made our way up Blackcomb to Base2, to competitive cheese action stations.
* = Apologies to Winston Churchill and Iron Maiden
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