Triple Crown!

the "Triple Crown" challenge!

...nobody said that global domination was going to be easy. Last Saturday, Vincent Lavallee organized an epic ride that included the three mountain climbs on the north shore aka the Triple Crown: Cypress, Grouse, and Seymour. He considerately wrote a survivour guide to assist those who may be ill-advised of the challenge (like me). Many showed up for the event, but not many survived/conquered all three of the challenging climbs.


It may not have been very pretty, but I was the legendary last survivour to endure the epic three mountains challenge.

How to become one step closer to achieving utter global domination, STEP No. 7: survive the Triple Crown.

I packed as much food as I could on this ride. Among the edible items include Gatorade powder enough to make 3 litres worth, candy, bagels and power bars! I armed myself with my trusty profile design slurpee bottle with the eye-popping straw and SPF 100 Ultra Sheer Neutrogena Sunscreen. I also tried freezing the water bottles, however that technique didn't pan out so well, as I was consuming warm gatorade all day.

One of my big highlights of the day was just surviving the last 1km stretch of climbing at Mount Seymour. Thinking 'HTFU Winstorm', I was nearly bonking and I tried gathering as much strength I could in the legs and back.

Some (I call keeners) were chasing time and others were chasing each other, while I was left chasing cheeseburgers and pain killers. Luckily I still had two power bars and there was a hot dog vendor at the top. Like when a snowboarder gracefully pulls off swiffer “S”-turns (see Snowboarding Dictionary), I was using nearly the entire 3-lane width of the road to make it up during the final kilometre. Ah yes, the path of least resistance. It wasn’t pretty, but eventually I got the job done.

Something I call reverse "Swiffers" on the final km

On top of that challenge, probably not the smartest decision albeit, was to get a 200+km ride in, because everybody knows that coming a few kilometres shy of double century is not as sweet. However due to battery power saving efforts, I lost 13km of the descent from Mount Cypress. So my final on-the-grid ride was 190km. My final result was an impressive feat, clocking 8.5 hours for 203km, and climbing over 2600m!