Doug Doyle is The Master!

Sometimes I think that I'd better get training hard and doing all the big races now because once I hit the mid thirty's, it's all going to be downhill from there. While I don't mean that I won't be able to do anything after that point, it's just that I have this feeling that my performance will just start to suffer. Then I went riding with Doug Doyle.

After the Victoria 'Pushing the Limits' presentation on Sunday night, Doug and I decided to take the afternoon off work and hook up with Gary Robbins before he headed back to Squamish for some good old mountain biking. I didn't have any particular route planned out but was able to show both of them lots of new trails that they had never ridden before. Lots of sweet singletrack was had by all. It was a pretty cold start but once we got the blood flowing, everything was good. With a pace that made me wonder if we were racing at times, I ended up taking a small bail that seemed like nothing at the time but made me stop and catch my breath minutes later to slow down the adrenaline. It wasn't until I arrived home and took off my tights that I found some deep chainring gouges in my right calf. This was far from stopping our ride though.

Several more climbs and flowing technical trails later, the rain picked up and turned to snow on the mountain. It was pretty special riding some of the best trails Vic has to offer with some big chunky flakes falling. As we decended, the snow turned to rain and soon enough, we wound up at the main Hartland parking lot with two hours of solid riding behind us.

After some quick "I'm freezing... gotta go" goodbyes, we parted ways and Gary and I loaded the bikes and headed down the mountain.

"Man, Doug's super fast eh? I mean, he was with us the whole time"

"Yeah, Doug is super impressive. He must be almost 50 by now. I only hope that I'm as good as he is when I reach that age."

"Yeah, when I grow up, I want to be as fast as Doug" :)