Second year for IceCycle races

WHAT: IceCycle races
WHEN: Feb. 8, 22 and March 8. Registration starts at 10 a.m.
INFORMATION: Call Bicycles Plus (832-1700) for more information. Parking is available at Jaybee Drive off Waverley Road in Dartmouth.

By Jon Tattrie - The Weekly News
Some of metro's speediest cyclists took to the ice Sunday for the IceCycle race series in Dartmouth.
Undaunted by the freezing temperatures, the riders shook off the winter blues by turning Lake Charles into a race track. Lawrence MacNeil of Windsor Junction finished first.
"It was a lot of fun," he said after the race. "It's the same (as normal biking), only flatter. You do a little bumping and grinding in the corners and away you go."
MacNeil mostly sticks to mountain biking and said the lake event is actually easier than his usual route through the woods. "You don't have any obstacles to ride over, steep hills to climb or trees to watch out for. Just keep your two wheels underneath you and peddle as hard as you can."
He said you can buy studded tires, but most of the racers make their own: all you need is a old mountain-bike tire with big grips and a few hundred screws. After protecting the inner tube by wrapping it in a road-bike tire, drive the screws through so the pointy end sticks out.
"With the studded tires, you can ride over almost anything, except soft snow. Hard-packed snow, ice, trails - you just go ride," MacNeil said.
Tom Kavanagh, one of the organizers of the event, was at Sunday's race.
"It was a beautiful day - a perfect day for racing," he said. "We got that five centimeters of snow (Saturday night) that made for a perfect track. We used snow banks to keep them inside the track."
Kavanagh, who works at Bicycles Plus, said lake racing makes for a better spectator sport than normal cycling because the competitors are always right in front of you, rather than flying past you in a Tour-de-France blur. He said they usually draw up to 30 racers and Sunday saw a crowd of 60 spectators. "It seemed like there were more photographers than participants," Kavanagh joked.
This is the second year of the IceCycle races.
"We thought it would be a fun event to do and it turned out really well with the two events we did last year, so we thought we'd try to do four of them this year," Kavanagh said. "It can be dangerous, but we wait till the ice is thick enough."
He say the cold can be a problem for competitors due to the stop-and-go nature of the event. Sunday's race was scheduled for Jan. 25, but temperatures dropped to -20 C, forcing a postponement.
"You're racing for 20 minutes, then you're stopping for 20 minutes for the other races. When you're riding in the woods, you don't stop as much," Kavanagh explained.
jon@jontattrie.ca