CODY SHIMIZU

A look into my life, a journal to look back on, a blog for others to see.

So after my first win in the Devon River Raid was the Canmore double header weekend with the Iron Maiden and the Organ Grinder. It was quite exciting being able to ride in the mountains again, and being the second time to canmore the trails were nice and fresh to me which was nice to have a change uo to my usual scenery in Edmonton. Only knowing the course from the Canmore mtb festival from the year before I went into Canmore expecting there to be a ton of climbing, but fortunately the course incorporated more of the lower trails beneath the Canmore Nordic center. This meant that there was less climbing, and the soft yogurt would be included (for those of you that don’t know soft yogurt is a super fun jump trail in canmore). Coming intobthis race with a win I was feeling quite confident, but I knew that the Canmore locals who usually don’t come out to the other ABA races were going to be there. Unfortunately I felt quite tired from the Wednesday night workout from the past week so I did not feel soo good coming into this race.

Off of the startline I felt quite good, with a race plan of trying to get into the single track first, I darted off and ended up second wheel into the single-track but by the end of the first lap I could feel that I had no depth in my legs. Throughout the race I slowly fell back as the Canmore locals, and other unfamiliar faces passed me. I ended up 7th in the race which I was not too disappointed by. Although I was hoping for a win to be upgrading to elite, it looked as though that was not to be for a while.

The next day was the Organ Grinder a 5hr MTB race. This was my first marathon race in my life so I was pretty excited, and a little worried of what was to come. I was paired up with Sam under the team name of doppelgang. After talking we decided that I would start, feeling pretty beat from the XCO race the day before I wanted to take today easy, but starting in a group ment the first lap was going to be a battle of the positions, so after a grueling first lap I tagged off with Sam. Through out the day we ended up doing 7laps in total (4 laps for me and 3 laps for Sam) we ended up around 7th. Which was better then I had expected, overall the weekend was lots of fun and got some nice experiences.

The next weekend I was back down in canmore for a Juventus Mtb camp, where Matt Hadley from Canmore was coaching us. When we got there we has a coaching session with Matt and to my surprise instead of riding technical trails, we were out in an open field by the Nordic center working on basic skills like the position on a bike, to skills like bunny hopping. At first I was a little dissapointed but as we went on the little session was super helpful in refining my self taught riding skills learnt from YouTube videos. After we rode the Highline trail in Canmore which included everything from slow technical trails to super fast jaw juddering downhills which was super fun. It was a great weekend and was able to refine some basic skills which I wouldn’t have even thought of working on.