This past Sunday was the first race in the Coupe Elpex
rollerski series. The race was held in Trois-Rivières.
Of the XCOttawa gang, only Ed and I decided it was worth the trip. So on Saturday,
right after work, we left for Trois-Rivières. We opted to camp and save a few bucks since the race organisation website had mentioned there was a free camping site. We thougth this would
be a good option and had reserved two spots.
Well, this place turned out to be pretty nice even though it wasn’t really what we expected. When we arrived, the camping was full of camper trailed and very few people seemed to actually be there for the race. The camp site was on the grounds of the Cap-De-La-Madelaine sanctuary
and had a nice view of the St-Laurence.
Sunday morning we woke up at 6:45am because we didn’t actually know where to find the race. By 8:30, we had found the place and were registrered. We decided that we would pre-ski the whole 10km course as a warmup. After the warmup, we had a bit of time to get ready and the race started. The course was fairly flat with only three small downhills and three small uphills. We all started really fast forming a gap right away. It was smooth sailing all the way with Remi Doiron doing most of the work once again. Benjamin Hébert also did a good job pulling the pack. Around the 8km mark, I decided to make my move and broke the 5 person pack in two. It was me and Rénald Brière at the front with the other guys around 3 seconds back.
I pulled the last 2km and tried to out-sprint Rénald at the end, but he ended up winning the sprint by less than one second. All in all, I can say the race went really well for myself. I was really suprised at how hard I could go without having the lactate levels get too high. I can say that my training, even though I didn’t get to do much because of injuries and lack of motivation, is going well.