Grayson Franks<\/a>, is a student at Chippewa Secondary School. is a competitive Junior (17\/18 year old category) cyclist in both mountain biking (MTB) and cyclocross (CX).<\/p>\nMTB is typically a summer sport while CX\u00a0is a fall-winter sport.<\/p>\n
In both disciplines, athletes compete to acquire Union Cycliste Internationale\u00a0(UCI)\u00a0points\u2026 the points collected rate the athletes worldwide<\/p>\n
\u201cUp until the last couple of years, I did most of my training around North Bay, just putting hours in on the road and in the local trails,” said Grayson.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
“When I joined Hardwood Hills, I started going to Orillia twice a week to train with the Hardwood Next Wave development team and later was invited to join Simulus Trek Racing team. Both teams provided me the opportunity to develop more skills in a social atmosphere.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Franks trains up to 15 hours a week on the bike plus some time in the gym.<\/p>\n
“The last couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to join Ontario cycling in Spain for some road training during the winter and mountain bike training in B.C in early spring,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Franks says he got the cycling inspiration from his parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Both of my parents were quite active in cycling and running, and it wore off on me,” he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I started riding my bike at a young age for fun and did an 8-hour mountain bike race on a team with my family at 8 years old. I loved every second, and to me, that\u2019s what started it all. That was one of my first races.\u201d<\/p>\n
The North American CX\u00a0schedule is mostly in the US at Rochester NY, Wisconsin, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Virginia, Baltimore, Washington DC and only one\u00a0race in Quebec City.<\/p>\n
He finished fourth in the Canadian National Championships in his last race in Quebec City.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That successful season allowed him to earn a spot on Team Canada in Belgium from mid-December to early January, called “Christmas Cross.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
This famous Belgian race series features roughly 11 races over a three-week period and includes the best racers in the world.<\/p>\n
He also qualified for a spot on Team Canada as one of four\u00a0junior male cyclists at CX\u00a0World Championships in the Netherlands at the end of January.<\/p>\n
Franks will be spending a few weeks between race blocks training in Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘Both of my parents were quite active in cycling and running, and it wore off on me’ A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-356828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}