What a year - 2024 has been another one for the books. From trail building to amazing new bikes, from huge group rides to intimate gatherings, there's been something for everyone. We've held some of our favourite events, helped a ton of customers and seen so many smiling faces, and we love it. We wanted to share some of our favourite moments of 2024 with you, so enjoy!
Ride Club 2024
2024 was an incredible year for Ride Club - our weekly road cycling club. Kicking off in April, Ride Club memberships sold out almost instantly. Organised into five groups for differing levels of fitness and ability, from Cat-1 racer to absolute beginner, our Ride Club is super inclusive, meaning just about anyone can join and have fun, owing to its popularity no doubt.
Photo: Sean Armenta
For 2024 we ran rides every Wednesday evening from the store, with a free BBQ once a month for Ride Club members. Partnering with CervĂ©lo, Specialized, Rapha, SRAM, and HLC, each BBQ had a different sponsor and theme. A Highlight for us was CervĂ©lo bringing Vingegaard's team S5 for us to look at.Â
Shore Sirens Partnership
Pennzoil Trail Days
We do our best to give back to the trails here on the North Shore, which is why we make a point of adopting a trail with the NSMBA every year. Our TAP adopted trail has been Pennzoil for the last few years, on Lower Fromme. In that time we've transformed it from one of the less loved trails, to one of the best kept trails on the mountain, with around 350 hours of volunteer dig time this season, including one WTNB+ trail day hosted in partnership with the Shore Sirens.
Work completed includes rebuilding the run-out of the optional black diamond rock roll, with new cedar planks and rocks to stabilize the trail surface, rebuilding the drainage above the wooden roller to prevent the trail washing out below it, and general drainage and surfacing, as well as rebuilding a couple of corners. It's safe to say that Pennzoil is running like a dream right now - go check it out before winter hits in full force. Read more here.
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NSMBA Fivers
Trail days aren't the only things we held with the NSMBA, we also hosted two Fiver Aprés parties. The NSMBA Fivers are a local Thursday night enduro race series, held on our local North Shore trails. The Fivers are strictly a friendly competition, with the focus on fun and having a good time, with no official leaderboard or prize giving.
Every Fiver is hosted by a different sponsor, who hosts an aprés after the race is done, and for 2024 we hosted the party for both a Classic Fiver and a WTNB Fiver. With help from Peppermint Cycling we catered for around 100 women at the WTNB Fiver, and 200 riders at the Classic Fiver with help from OneUp Components. As per usual, riders were greeted with a blazing BBQ and gourmet food including chilli dogs, salmon burgers and ice cream, as well as a selection of drinks from Beva Brewing and Kirk's Probiotic Soda.
We're always stoked to see a big turn-out for these events, supporting the local trails and community, so thank you to everyone that showed up and took part, as well as all the volunteers and staff for helping to organize and run the events. The Fivers are always some of the most fun events of the year.
Talk Nights
From big Fiver events to intimate gatherings, we did it all. We held talk nights this year in partnership with the Shore Sirens and 7mesh, with legendary guests. March saw us hold a talk night on the history of the local trails and local riders, with Wade Simmons, Kelli Sherbinin, Elladee Brown, Betty Birrell, and more. Giving us a captivating peek into the early freeride mountain bike scene, it was a night not to be missed.
In November we caught up with Ultra cyclists Meaghan Hackinen and Svein Tuft to talk all things bikepacking, ultra-racing and everything type-2 fun, from riding through epic rain storms, to what kind of candy goes down the best. Shining a light into what it means to truly push the human body to its limits, we all came away with a renewed sense of inspiration to get out there and test our boundaries.
