Ride The Lobster: The Aftermath
(How about that for the name of a sequel?)
This photo was me and my team at the end of our stage win on Day 4 of the Ride The Lobster race. We were a scratch team having not met before arriving in Nova Scotia, and with a range of ability from Chuck (left), a scary unicycling machine and probably the fastest rider around at the moment; me (right), fairly fast but not quite up there with the best racers; and Geoff (centre) who was a good solid rider but new to big-wheeling with less spinning experience than many people here. Saying this, we got within sight of a win on Day 2, after running in the lead for a while. That pushed us to give everything to go like the clappers on Day 4 (Day 3 was a time-trial day) and get a stage win. Wrestling back and forth with the other top teams - Geman Speeders, NZUNI, Personal Rollercoaster and Texicali (the eventual top four teams overall) was awesome, and somehow we got to the front somewhere mid-way through the day, and pedalled like crazy to keep hold of the lead. In the end we kept a couple of minutes over the excellent riders of the Germans and New Zealanders - so we were pretty chuffed. :)
In the end we finished up holding 5th place, which was very cool (top five teams are represented above out of order - this was the very start of Day 2 - from left: Vince LeMay, Ken Looi, Me, Corbin Dunn and Jan Logermann). It was an incredible and humbling experience all week to meet and ride with so many top riders, and to get blasted past by some amazingly strong athletes. I got to meet many of the big names which I have been inspired by from a distance for years, and ride alongside the likes of Kris Holm, Ken Looi, Tony Melton, Nathan and Beau Hoover and many others.
Riding unicycles may be enough to make it a unique sport, you might think. But really it is the spectacular sporting attitudes and comradere to be found at the highest level of competition. Especially the Criterium - a ’round the block’ street race of six laps in the closed streets of Truro - which allowed for closer proximity to the other riders than we got on the long-distance team days. It was the most highly charged buzz I’ve ever known around unicycling, and at the end of the faster of the three races, with all the other competitors, we just wanted to hug and hand-shake everyone else racing for such an awesome ten minutes of racing. There’s nothing like starting 35 fast unicyclists in a bunch and letting them pelt around four tight corners and four short straights, leaning hard over on the corners and straining for acceleration up the straights. That’s something to get the juices flowing. Woooo!
There are far too many annecdotes and amusing stories to bore you with, so I’ll spare you them, but suffice it to say it was a week of such excitement, fun, friendship, challenge, hills, torrential rain, fame, humility, endless trees, open roads, sunshine, encouragement, randomness, lobster, bananas, international accent-swapping and unicycle-swapping as I’ve ever known. Definitely one week I’ll never want to forget.
Then I went to New York City. More later…
