Friday, March 25, 2005
Quebec national mountain bike team comes to in Roanoke County for an early-season training camp
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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For many young adults, spring break is about beaches, beer and bikinis.
For about two dozen Canadians, spring break has been about lung- and leg-burning bike rides around Southwest Virginia.
The Quebec national mountain bike team is staying at Camp Roanoke in Roanoke County for an early-season training camp. The riders, who range from 15 to 27, are putting in monster miles under the close supervision of three coaches.
"It's the same thing every day," 17-year-old rider Alexandre Fortier said Wednesday while eating a massive lunch to refuel from that morning's 55-mile ride. "We wake up, eat, ride, eat, sleep, ride, eat and sleep."
Velo de montagne, as the team is known in its homeland, has been holding its spring training camps in Western Virginia for the past few years.
Coach Michel LeBlanc said Virginia is a good destination because it offers good roads and challenging terrain, and the team can reach the area by van in a day, albeit a long, 12-hour day.
This is the group's first visit to the Roanoke area. Recent camps were based out of a lodge in Stuarts Draft, but the cyclists had to find a new base camp when that business recently closed.
The search led them to Camp Roanoke, a county-owned facility that features modest cinder block cabins, a central dining area, and convenient access to some of the region's more popular bike routes.
Riders, who earned their spots on the team by their performances this past season, are responsible for about a quarter of the cost of the camp. The government-backed team picks up the balance of the tab.
Tuesday, the riders and coaches had mostly positive things to say about the riding around Roanoke.
"The Blue Ridge Parkway is perfect for climbing," said Gabriel Bolduc, an 18-year-old from Montreal. "It is really hard, and good training."
LeBlanc, who lives in Quebec City, said the area's drivers have been courteous.
"People are very nice by car," said LeBlanc, who pedals along with the team during training rides.
Olivia Gagne praised the condition of the roads, which don't suffer the brutal pounding Quebec's pavement receives during frigid winters.
"The roads are really flat," said Gagne, an 18-year-old from Quebec City. "In Quebec the roads are really cracked."
Not everything has been perfect.
"There is a lot of dogs," laughed 18-year-old Gabriel Bolduc of Montreal.
During a training ride Monday, Bolduc was chased by a dog, which eventually knocked him off his bike. Bolduc wasn't hurt, and thought the incident was pretty funny.
After a long, cold winter, Bolduc and his counterparts are willing to put up with a few road-riding challenges. For most of the riders, the camp is their first chance in months to ride bikes outside. Much of Quebec is still buried under snow.
In addition to riding indoors on training bikes, many of the riders snowshoe and cross country ski through the winter to stay fit.
The team rides only road bikes during the camp for a couple of reasons. For one, they have only one trailer for hauling their bikes so there simply isn't room for riders to bring both a mountain bike and a road bike to the camp.
Also, road bikes are better suited for putting in lots of miles and building a good fitness base. That's important because the mountain bike racing season starts soon in Canada, with the national championship early in the season, in June.
"It's an important event," 19-year-old Jonathan Boulanger said of the race, which is used to determine who will represent Canada in this summer's world championship mountain bike races in Italy.
Several of the team's riders have excelled at the sport's highest levels.
Gagne won the Canadian national championship last year as a junior. Her 17-year-old brother, Raphael, won the boys junior national championship.
Raphael, who is also riding at the camp, was part of a four-rider Canadian team that won the junior mountain bike relay race at last summer's world championships in France.
The mountain bike team will head back to Quebec this weekend, just as the province's national road bike team arrives in Roanoke County for its spring training camp.
Although the camp is difficult, the riders do find time to have some fun.
"Sometimes we do something special, like go to Dairy Queen," said Fortier, adding that by the end of a day of training the riders don't have a desire to do much else. "Just the DQ is enough."
