BC Bike Race: Prologue

Welcome to the BC Bike Race. Jeff, Simon, Dave and I all signed up for this race just 6 short months ago. Since then we have logged countless hours of training, planning and preparing for this week! It has been a fun journey along the way, but it is great to finally be here and getting underway! We've gotten to BC, we've gotten the prologue under our belts, we've made ourselves comfortable in our rolling home for the next week, and we're ready to go!

The Day of Queues

A line to check in, a line for sunglasses (yes, free sunglasses), a line for the meal plan, and a line for the 5KM time trial. That being said, everything was incredibly on time, organized and under control. It just took that long to process 500 racers! But otherwise, it was a great experience. Everyone just chatted up their neighbors in line, and it was a good time! And the schwag! Amazing! A Dakine Roller bag, a jersey, a t-shirt, a pair of sunglasses, a full box of protein bars, two pairs of socks. Quite the haul, I must say!

So today, they started us off with a 5K time trial. They did this to give us an opportunity to stretch our legs and to seed people in the waves for the coming days. Per the crew in our RV: Time trial = technical; fun, not in ca anymore, toto; dangerous; crash-free zone; redline; burned our first matches; too short; unsatisfying. Simon has a helmet cam for this week, and got a great video of today's route, but unfortunately, he had is camera on UPSIDE DOWN, so until we fix that, this post will be without video. He should have it fixed moving forward, so we should be able to share video on subsequent days.

So you might ask: since all four of you are racing, who's driving the RV? Well, Dave's brother generously offered to drive us around for the duration of the race, making our lives much more comfortable and convenient than our fellow racers who chose the "camping" option.  It is fairly roomie, has a full kitchen in which Dave cooked a fabulous pre-race dinner this evening, and plenty of room for us to unpack all our clothes and gear with space left over for Dave's mom's homemeade granola bars, cranberry bars and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies!

Least Boring Orientation EVER!

So usually at these types of events, there is a very cookie-cutter type of orientation - go over the route, talk about etiquette, talk about safety, blah, blah, blah. That being said, these guys knew how to keep it entertaining. They did all the things I mentioned above, but with a certain flare that made the whole 70 minutes fly by! The highlight of the "show", however, was the race Senator, and safety expert. I have never laughed so many times during a safety talk. He told us all about saddle sores, how they happen, how to prevent them , and the giggling that will occur in the medical tent when you come in to ask for help. He told us how to deal with the wildlife in Canada: black bears-fight back, grizzly bears-you won’t win, cougars-fight back; Whistler cougars detection technique-check for small pox vaccines - this might go over the heads of some of the younger readers of this blog, but was damn funny nonetheless.




So now, we are heading to bed to rest up for what is our longest distance day. It is certainly not the toughest as it is actually the day with the least elevation. We ferry over to our start tomorrow on the island - a fun adventure in itself. Not sure if we will have wi-fi there, but if we do, expect a report on Day 1 to appear! Fear not, whether we connect tomorrow or not, we will have a blog post for every day of the race!