You likely won’t hear Jasper’s mountain biking prodigy bragging over beers in the bar, but anyone who’s seen him ride will tell you that Cory Wallace is on a whole different level.
“He’s one of these guys in Jasper who you could talk to him for like 45 minutes and have no idea he’s doing these incredible things,” Jasperite John Bartziokas recently joked.
Every year Wallace travels around the globe competing against the world’s top mountain bikers in marathon mountain bike races; the blog where he records his journey through the professional circuit reads like a who’s who of professional cycling.
Last June, for example, he competed in “the pinnacle of marathon racing” at the UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships in South Africa. That race featured six past Olympic champions in a field of some of the most talented mountain bikers on Earth.
“[To] have all these guys converge on one place was going to create an epic battle as you were basically putting a pile of sharks in a small fish tank,” Wallace wrote of the race.
He spent a good chunk of that race locked in a battle with French champion Thomas Dietch, before dropping him and pushing to a top-20 finish.
Not long before that, he raced in the SellaRonda Hero Marathon, placing 15th in a field of more than 4,000.
“This was a nice result given my horrible start and the fact only 14 guys were faster on the day and 3,999 were slower,” he wrote.
Wallace spent about three months overseas last year, racing in Taiwan, Europe and Malaysia. He also raced in Australia, where last spring he won the Australian Marathon Series.
And while he spends most of the year jetting from one international race to the next, every winter he checks back in to Canada for three months to work as a tree faller in northern Alberta. He lives off that three months of income for the rest of the year as he competes in races across the globe.
“A lot of it is self-funded,” Wallace said. “I do have supporters, but I’d say that half is self-funded and half is sponsored.”
To keep up with the costs, Wallace “keys into” races with big prize purses, like the Australian series. In early September, Wallace will return to Mongolia to defend his title at the 10-day Mongolian Bike Challenge.
He’s won the race the last two years, snagging bragging rights and some decent prize money, and he said he feels good about his chances to defend his title again this year.
“A race like that, anything can happen, but I think I’ll go in with the fitness and experience to win it,” he said. “As long as someone doesn’t sabotage the course I should be fine.”
And while Wallace is eager to defend his title in Mongolia, this year he’s completely refocusing his season around a brand new race—one that has no comparisons in the professional mountain biking scene.
It’s called the Munga. It will be a 1,000-kilometre, single-stage, unsupported race through South Africa. Wallace said the winning pair will have to ride non-stop for about 45 hours, and will likely break the world record for distance covered on a bike in the process.
The total prize money for the race is $1 million, with $750,000 going to the winners.
“Whoever wins is going to do it non-stop,” Wallace said. “We’ll go as long as our bodies will allow us to, or we cross the finish line.”
To prepare, Wallace and his partner for the race, 24-hour world champion rider Jason English, will train 20-30 hours a week, going for daily six-hour rides, with even longer rides sprinkled in. They will also use upcoming races as “training blocks” to hone their fitness.
Right now, Wallace is in the middle of the Singletrack Six race—a six-day multi-stage race through western Canada—which he said is more like a “fun, build-up event” to get him in shape for Munga.
After that he’ll head to Colorado, where he’ll compete in the Leadvill Trail 100 mountain bike race. Leadville, a race previously won by Lance Armstrong, is a 100-mile (160-kilometre) race across the high-altitude Rocky Mountain terrain.
But for Wallace it’s all just a lead-up to December, when he’ll face his toughest race ever, and hope to snag some serious prizes money, and a whole lot of glory.
Trevor Nichols
[email protected]
