Riding For Real with Josh Carlson and Yoann Barelli

What you have here is a real mountain bike ride, a day in the life of a pro. Like the postal service, neither rain nor shine, snow nor sleet… Professional mountain bikers are apart from their bikes for only a small handful of reasons: travel, sickness, injury and strategically chosen rest days. When you compete for a living, travel is inevitable, rest days are a rare blessing, and sickness and injury keep you from making money. Training days are paramount. Sure, it’s the race days that pay the bills, but it’s all that time preparing that gets you to the finish line faster.

What you see is not a video edit pieced together with carefully choreographed and sessioned bits of trail. There was no “una mas” uttered during the filming of this, no “go back up two turns and do it again.” Instead, this is an honest look at how a Frenchman and an Australian spend a springtime training day in Vancouver. Apart from a wee bit of smiling for the camera and the odd stop to play with tire pressures and suspension settings — the two teammates were also testing their new SRAM ROAM 60 wheels — Barelli and Carlson just kept “swimming” up and down Mount Seymour, banging out 33.9 rain-soaked kilometers and climbing 1,324 meters over the 4 hours and 40 minutes we filmed them. They weren’t quite finished when we turned off the cameras, either.

Like the Frenchman and the blue cartoon fish say, “Just keep swimming.”