Catharine Pendrel

The Black Forest area of Germany reminds me a lot of the Okanagan Valley. Beautiful hills lined with intricately formed vineyards, orchards and fruit stands selling fresh strawberries and asparagus. Needless to say I love it there. I always look forward to it and feel right at home. Like last year, we chose to stay at Edy's Hotel in Ortenberg and just like last year we were spoiled with gorgeous food at their family run restaurant. On Mondays they close to prepare all the spices that will flavor their week's dishes. Each dish was cook and flavoured perfectly and had us well fueled for the race. Maybe that's why I felt good to do another lap in the race! I had another good start. I always knew how hard you had to go at a start, but now I believe it and make myself do it! It's still a work in progress though and sometimes I forget the start is as long as it takes me to be at the front so sometimes I start well, loose spots and then get it back together. That

From Dalby we traveled to London on way to little sleep. My typical post race midnight wakefulness combined with a 5am wake up call meant I was pretty much a wreck. But the organizers of the Olympics were giving us the opportunity to ride the Olympic course and training started at 11. Getting to ride the. Olympic course did help to energiize me though! Driving there I was thankful to live in a town Kamloops's size. I hate traffic! It took almost 6hrs to get to Hadleigh farms, but we got there thanks to Zak and Waldek and enjoyed some beautiful sunshine on a great course. Just as it had been ridiculously windy at Dalby, Hadleigh farms, located on the south shore of England was equally windy and on certain sections of the course we were blown up or felt like we had hands pushing us backwards or over. The loop is fast, hard packed dirt with some loose rock sections to challenge climbing skills. lots of rocks were brought in from northern England (where the rocks are harde

After Arizona, I was treated to some home time. With all the rain that always seems to come while I'm away Kamloops is a lovely green (for Kamloops), little veggies and flowers are starting to poke out of the garden and I am toying with my yearly Reno ideas. Before I can get up to too much destruction however I am off to England and the 2nd world cup race in Dalby Forest. I really like the course in Dalby. It's a fast course with some fun technical challenges. Last year the start proved to be critical and the course hard to move up on if you had any challenges. Team luna would be returning to our comfy self catered cottage, a renovated stable with an inner courtyard and about 10 mother and foal couplings in the back paddock. Zak saved the day when after hearing a large crash he found a foal tangled up in a fence with both hind legs in the air. Grabbing his wire cutters he freed the foal with the owner's help and the foal was back to his blitzing around. Diner aga

From South Africa I went solo to Arizona.  I stayed in Tempe for 2 nights until Luna mechanic Chris joined up with me.  In Tempe the friendly guys at Cactus cycle pointed me to some super fun trails on South Mountain and I did my best to not go too hard on the punchy trails as i recovered from jet lag and adapted to the really warm weather.  I tried out my Camelbak racebak with ice in it and it was awesome to help keep me cool out in the desert. On Thursday Chris and I headed up to Prescott to pre-ride the 25mile loop of the Whiskey off Road race that I would be doing that weekend.  Chris doesn’t get to mountain bike with us all that much, typically taking care of our bikes, but that boy has skills and showed me how to rail on the loose San Luis Obisbo type descents. The view from the top (somewhere around 2000m is Prieta overlook) After leaving cool scenery in Tempe and going through some uninspiring areas of Arizona for riding I was relieved when we arrived in Prescott (pronoun

Despite logging over 60-80hrs of travel in the last week+, I seem to have found very little time to tell you about any of my travels. The first World Cup of the Season was in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.   The course was fantastic.  The organizers had obviously put a lot of time into it and the weather conditions, unlike the previous weekend where they got 100mm of rain, were fantastic. The Luna crew flew into Johannesburg and then did the 5+hr drive south.   The  scenery was much like Colorado and Utah until we were almost to our destination about 100km from the south east coast and it became more lush and rolling. We were caught out by the season change to fall (having changed hemispheres) and got to the course ready to ride at 4:30 only to have it be really dark and start thundering by 5:30.  Bummer. We did get to see some vervet monkeys though. South Africa, doesn’t look too different from North America, however the obvious racial distinctions in economics and life left