Yoann Barelli and Josh Carlson spend a day in the drizzle ripping around some beautiful Vancouver woodland singletrack
Yoann Barelli and Josh Carlson are the featured riders in a new video from SRAM that’s intended to show the long hours and days of practice that goes on behind the scenes in a pro riders life.
In the video Barelli and Carlson are shot riding around Mt Seymour forest trails in Vancouver for a whole day of training. They total 34km with 1,324m of climbing.
>>> SRAM drops carbon enduro 29er wheel due to lack of demand
This new video from SRAM makes something of a refreshing change. There’s no noisy music soundtrack. There’s no music at all actually, just the sounds of the forest and the bikes. There’s no slo-mo scenes. There’s even scenes of the riders doing some sat-down riding – virtually unheard of in a MTB edit!
It’s cold. The temperature never gets above 5 degrees. It’s rainy. The near perma-drizzle is particularly comforting to watch if your a UK rider.
>>> SRAM introduces cheaper model for all-mountain wheelset
The trails the guys are riding are Severd D, Uper Dale’s Trail and Forever After. Just in case you find yourself plotting a riding holiday in Canada – which you may well do after watching the video.
The video is nominally about SRAM’s new Roam 60 wheels. Not that you’d know it. There’s no real mention of them and precious little lingering shots of the wheels.
It’s hard to tell in gloom exactly but it looks like Barelli and Carlson are riding around on Giant Reign 27.5 enduro bikes.
>>> Steve Peat shows us his winter training loop
SRAM press release: “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.”