BC Bike Race Day 4

Here's the short and sweet for Canada day.

Woke up way too early after a surprisingly cold night to start our bus-ferry-bus-ferry voyage.  Tried to sleep along the way a bit, had a nice breakfast, and upon final arrival, did have a little warmup time.

Started well today, just held a pace up the hill, and ended up staying in a better group.  The other day we rode singletrack behind Alyson Sydor for a while, that was a treat.  Today on the hillclimb start they dropped off earlier, as did Hestler on a road bit.  Funny.  Felt nice to be riding better.  I'm learning a lot about sodium this year.  Ran down my stores to low again, getting better at recognizing symptoms and more importantly, prevention tricks.  Too bad I'm a slow learner.

We hammered through a lot of power climbs, endlessly so.  Rode with Ryan Trebon and Georgia Gould, for quite a while until...

Devin flatted again.  That's ok, only a few minute fix, but never fun having people whizzing by.  We put ourselves back together and trucked on, caught a bunch of them right away.  Few more on a hike a bike section, few more on the singletrack.  Got to riding with Ryan Trebon through the trees again, good stuff, fun to ride behind him. 

The day had two remaining salient points.  The race ended up being longer than represented by the organizers, which I'm ok with as you should never count on a short finish, just consider it a blessing when it comes and always keep energy reserves... but most people didn't like it.  Second, Devin flatted again.

We fixed that and sped in, so again it looks like "sans flats" we're roughly 10 mins behind Craig and Shawn, and we're in 12th still.  Better yet we rode solid and I felt pretty good.

Good karma is due though as I lent my backup pedals to a lady today who broke hers.

Craig and Shawn had their best day yet, Bee survived again in third, Geoff and Pat in second.  Mical and Jeff looked "challenged" when we passed them, but they held it together and came in very shortly past us.  My favourite part now that we're halfway in and 4 days of branding has taken effect is all kinds of people coming up and asking just who these deadgoats are, and why they're so fast.  Tori, Geoff and Pat are doing podiums daily, Craig and Shawn are seen regularly at the front, and Devin and I are doing what we can.  Awesome!

Aside from bike race banter, the weather has been awesome, our travelling caravan is in its midweek gel period, and everyone seems to be having a blast.