The Benefit of Early Season Racing for Canadian Riders
Valley of the Sun Race Report
While living here in Canada, it is often difficult for Junior Road Endurance athletes to get some longer training miles in the legs and more importantly much needed early season “in real life” racing. Most riders spend time on the Velodrome, The Zwift Platform or cross training with sports like Nordic Skiing. Don’t get me wrong, these are fantastic training tools, however… Banging Bars with experienced Junior teams in February serves as the perfect race rehearsal and boost of intrinsic motivation for the season to come!
Ignite Junior Cycling is grateful for the support from sponsors to be able to organize and execute an early season team project to Phoenix, Arizona for the annual Valley Of The Sun Stage Race! Leading up to the event, riders had the opportunity to complete five days of training in a warmer climate. Rider testing on the South Mountain segment and rehearsing on the race courses helped prepare the riders for the three-day stage race which included a Time Trial, Road Race and a Criterium.
The week was also an opportunity to begin connecting as a team and normalizing the routines that come with attending events in the sport of cycling. Athletes got their first taste of cooking team dinners. The Coaches laid down a few sample meals to raise the level of expectations for dinner (haha!) and helped educate riders on shopping for nutritionally dense food items when fueling for rides. We still have some normalizing to do in the cooking department!!
Parallelling the normalization of off the bike tasks, we began the process of making sure everyone is on the same page for training rides and race days. Junior athletes need to learn how to arrive at a start line ready and capable of beginning the event. The benefit of Phoenix was that we could begin this process of race day normalization much earlier in the season. By the time we head to Europe in August, the squad should be able to smoothly arrive at a start line in a calm, cool, collected manner, ready to race!
Early season racing was the next biggest benefit for our team being in Phoenix. Ignite rider Charles Bergeron passes on an update on the three stages of racing;
“My First stage was a 16km TT, flat course, no wind, and blue skies! I tried to get as aero as possible on my road bike finishing 5th to open the event. Saturday was a 4 lap Road Race course providing just over 100km of desert terrain. It was a fairly flat course with a slight wind. This race was mostly about positioning in the bunch and it can get challenging sometimes with the "yellow line rule". Some Ignite riders had a bit of bad luck with a crash in the first lap so it was up to the rest of the team to follow the moves which we thought would work. Unfortunately, we missed the winning breakaway of 5 riders. Hudson finished 7th and 9th for myself, good learning from this race and next time the goal will be to be part of that winning breakaway. The final stage was a 1.5 km criterium course, lasting a quick 45 minutes. This was an important stage for the team as we were very aggressive. We had at least 1 rider from the team in every attack and I even got a few solo attempts myself. As we missed the winning breakaway the previous day, we weren't going to let that happen again! The final few laps were very fast and we had to position ourselves well for the final sprint. Escaping crashes, trying to find ‘free speed’ in the peloton and having few attempts of winning the race, I ended 3rd on the day with Kaden 5th”.
- Charles Bergeron
Overall this opportunity has been an amazing start to the 2023 season! Ignite Junior Cycling landed on a few podiums and was competitive against Hot Tubes Junior Cycling and EF/ONTO Junior Cycling teams, two of the strongest USA based junior squads. Thanks again to our sponsors Giordana, NamedSport, Bridge the Gap, Shimano, Lazer and Sounds Solutions who have contributed to Ignite Junior Cycling. Athletes could not develop as riders without this support.
Next up is Track Nationals in Bromont, followed by Killington Mountain Stage Race, Canadian National Championships and then over to Europe. Stay tuned for the next race report.
