Wednesday, June 22, 2016

BC Enduro Series Williams Lake race report: Sunday, May 22nd by Kieran Nilson
Heading out to my second BC enduro this season was super exciting. The plan was to leave Thursday, catch the ferry and stay overnight in whistler. That next morning my dad shuttled Carter and I up creek side so we could do a lap of BC’s trail; one of my favorite DH trails. It’s normally bike park access only but not if you know where to go! Haha! After the ride we cleaned up, ate breakfast and hit the Duffy Lake road. 
We drove through the whole day finally arriving at Williams Lake after about a six hours drive from whistler. We had time to climb up and practice stage 1. Williams Lake was fast and flowy with lots of pedalling. We totally passed out that night. The next day, the plan was to go and get Carter’s bike fixed at the shred shed, then head out for practice. We practiced from 11:30 to 8:00pm eventually meeting up with a good friend Elliot Jamieson. All the stages were super-fast and fun except for stage 3. Having handlebars roughly half the width of the standard size would’ve been ideal to do the many, many tight trees we had to thread through. 
The skies were clear for the race the following day. We packed our stuff up, and rode down to the racer meeting to pick up our plates and chips. Luckily, we were allowed to shuttle up to stage 1 as it was going to be a hot day. My dad gave Bobby, a friend we met at practice, Elliot, Carter and I a ride up near the top but stopping so we could pedal the last bit to get in a warmup. I had a pretty good stage one and two, riding fast and riding clean. Stage three didn’t go as well do to some crashing, but I still didn’t end up placing to bad. Stage four I rode reasonably well with a couple mistakes taking poor line choices.
My day was going pretty well all the way up until stage five, where I ended up crashing and ripping out my front brake line. Stage five also happened to be the steepest of them all and I was completely unable to ride the stage. I had to run/slide my way down the stage before timing out. I lost three minutes. 
Despite that mechanical, I ended up placing eighth out of twelve which wasn’t so bad I guess. Other than stage three, I was less than 5 seconds behind Carter so I would’ve placed third or fourth. I was super stoked to see Carter take the win. All in all, Williams Lake enduro was a pretty successful weekend and I’m stoked to head out to Kamloops in a week.

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