Our final team training ride - we're ready!!

Submitted by Stan Shaw

There nothing like a massive goal, like this one, to work towards.   Today's ride to Cypress was a tremendous opportunity for all of us to see how far we've come.

I managed to get away early on Saturday morning, so I headed over to West Vancouver and did my first climb up Cypress from 21st Avenue on Marine Drive before the others arrived.  What a beautiful morning.  The sunrise as I was riding along Kits beach on the way to the Lions Gate bridge was spectacular.

Team riders Leona Pinsky, Martina Meckova, James Zlosnik, Rebecca Malott and Brenda Cairns met me back at Cindy's Cafe on Marine Drive in West Vancouver.  Brenda had come all the way from Victoria the night before just to be part of the ride today.


<--Brenda Cairns

It was terrific meeting her. I was astonished to learn that she has done seventeen Iron Man competitions over the years.  A pretty remarkable athlete!

Together, we headed back up 21st avenue to reach the Upper Levels highway.  That hill coming up from Marine Drive is brutal. It's not quite as bad as 22nd avenue, the next street over, but the grades are a pretty constant 11%, at times touching 13% on the way up.  Once we got to Cypress, the grades become a bit easier, 7 to 8%, and more in line with what we will be experiencing on our big mountain passes going to Banff.


We made it to the Cypress viewpoint almost exactly half way up the mountain, a great opportunity for photos.

Left to right: Avi Ostrey (alumni rider), Brenda Cairns, Martina Meckova, Leona Pinsky, James Zlosnik, Rebecca Malott, Stan Shaw ---> 

Our new GearUp4CF 2010 custom jerseys arrived this week - they look and feel terrific! Kudos go to Martina for the great design she did.

While we were there, fellow team rider Justin Chan rolled in on his bike. You will probably read about his adventures in Justin's personal riding journal, (click here). Justin had just come from Seymour mountain and was climbing Cypress mountain as well.  We have some pretty strong riders on our team this year.

After our short stop at the viewpoint, I then headed back down the mountain to Marine, while the others continued up to the summit  Feeling pretty good myself, I tackled 21st avenue from Marine Drive for a third time and managed to reach the viewpoint half way up the mountain just in time for the others to come off the summit to meet me there.

<--Our route plotted on my bike's Garmin GPS. Click on the photo for a larger image. For more details, click here

Saturday's grade profile, ascending from Marine Drive once to the top of Cypress, then twice to the Cypress viewpoint half way up. The three very sharp grades are the ascents up 21st avenue from Marine Drive-->

A quick return over the Lions Gate bridge towards home got Brenda back in time to make the ferry back to Victoria. On the way, we stopped in to Siegel's Bagels on Cornwall, and basked in the sunshine with a well-deserved bagel and coffee to finish the ride. Then everyone disappeared to rejoin our families for the afternoon. No doubt they were wondering why we were so late getting home!

What was especially great about the ride, aside from the HUGE accomplishment for everyone on making it up Cypress, is that we had a chance to meet each other and chat along the way.  I had never met Brenda, so it was great she could join us, before our big ride.  And it was so good seeing Christoph again. A Ph.D. candidate who is planning to complete his thesis this year, he is specializing in Cystic Fibrosis research.  We rode together during last year's ride, and, I was delighted to learn, will be riding with us for the first two days this year.

James Zlosnik-->

James, who was riding with us today, is a post doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Understanding and Preventing Infections in Children, here in Vancouver.  A veteran GearUp4CF cyclist, he is planning to present some of the work his lab has been doing in CF research during our ride.  The lab where he works is headed by Dr. David Speert, an avid cyclist himself, who founded GearUp4CF five years ago. His research team will soon be joined by Rebecca Malott, who has been working in research back East but is coming this summer to start a new CF project in the Speert lab. Riding with researchers like James and Rebecca (and Justin Chan, who is also a researcher, doing related work at Children's Hospital), makes the effort we are doing in raising funds for Cystic Fibrosis research so relevant for us. We see exactly where these donation dollars are going.

If anything this final training ride proved today, it's this: We're ready!! And, thanks to your incredible support, we're ready from a fundraising perspective, too.  I heard on Friday that we've surpassed our goal of raising $90,000.  What you, our sponsors, have done is to provide hope. And hope is so important to the children I am riding for, and many other CF children and young adults who are struggling to breath each day.  So let's not stop there.  Let's do even better than that.  If you have not donated yet, can you help us?

Only five more days to go!

- Stan


Would you like to sponsor a favorite rider? Click on their name anywhere on this journal to open their "bio" on the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation GearUp4CF web site, click on the button "Sponsor this Rider", and you will join our team!