Friday, June 26, 2009

The Canada Day Classic...

On deck for next week is our world famous Red Deer Lake Road Race. So mark your calendars for Wednesday July 1st and check your watches as we're launching this one at 1:00pm. While not actually all that close to Red Deer Lake and not even really within sight of Red Deer Lake we just thought the name sounded cool. This ought to be a good one. We'll meet at the Red Deer Lake School to form the groups up but I would encourage people to park at the Priddis Meeting Spot at 22 and 22X as the race finishes down there. It's a nice easy warmup ride to the school along 22X where we'll start things off. If you're a little late or maybe a little wimpy you could park at 37th st and 22X in between the lanes where guys park their pickup trucks and sell Chilean cherries they bought here in town as authentic Okanagan cherries or hock Mexican corn as Taber corn.

View Priddis Meeting Spot (PMS) in a larger map
As for the race itself ... we'll be doing a hill or two on this one and then a good flatter hammer home. We'll start at the Red Deer Lake School parking lot where we'll form into three groups and I'll give the first group a predetermined and completely arbitrary head start. Same for the next group and finally the hammerheads get to chase them all down so its a group pursuit race. First to the line claims honours and the adoration of millions. We'll ride up neautralish from the school to 37th St where we'll turn south on 773 and follow that with its little jog to 549 where we'll trun west. We'll follow 549 to 22 and turn north onto 22 where you can hammer with the wolves nipping at your heels to 22X eastbound with the finish at the top of the hill about a kilometre later. Distance is around 47km and it should be a bit of an exciting hammer. Beginners are more than encouraged and I'm generous with the head starts so don't be intimidated by that. The paving is recent and its generally pretty quiet on the roads out there so I'm looking foward to it.

View Larger Map
We can then regroup at the Priddis Meeting Spot for a bit of a roundup and the sharing of war stories. I need a couple of volunteers for this as there are a couple of turns so bring a friend and as a bonus they'll get to see this race of awesomeness from the front row.

2 comments:

Darryl said...

I'd like to give you a hand on the road for this one. I'm doing a half-ironman the following weekend, so a hammerfest is not on my programme for Wednesday. Mocking and derision from the shoulder of the road would be good though.

Spirogeek said...

Mocking and derision is always welcome. I would assume you're doing GWN then. Good luck, I'll be watching the race but my team copped out for this year.