BC Bike Race Blogspot: Team Winded www.bcbikerace.com Day 2 and Day 3

Well, I accidentally deleted day 2 trip report and am running out of BB
juice as well, so we'll give you the rundown on both days.

Day1 (108km/1300m)

Day2
Longer (118km) and more altitude (1800m), but we both felt better.

Our friend Jeff from Ottawa caught a 3hr penalty because his partner is so
much slower. So the partners wife calls him a 'fuckhead; and threatens to
throw out his bikebox stored at their house. Very funny. Needless to say,
they no longer are partners, as Jeff has a more well matched team.

So it seems our competition is 2 girl teams (#2 and #3 overall women) and 2
guys from Toronto both of whom we beat day2 (and lost to, by a hair, day3).
The women are *so* impressive. Trevor thinks his wife would be very good at
these endurance events. These women are impressive.

Day3
Distance 85km Altitude 1400, with a kind of tough 1.5 hour hike a bike up
800m of gravel. Great views though :-). It finished with 10km of typical
west coast single track, pretty much as or more difficult than anything we
see in Ottawa. The trick is just go fast !

We really paced today, and took it slow up the 800m walk due to Trevor's bad
knee, and as a result lost 2 spots overall, hopefully to make it up day4.
What is good about this is that we everyday pass a lot of teams the last
20km, and usually finish hanging it all out, which is fun.

Day4 part 'une'
Started to write this on the way to the ferry terminal. -up at 4:30 am. Race
starts at 11am this morning as we will have 2 ferry rides. The day should be
interesting coming down to Sechelt on the Sunshine coast on more of this
single track stuff.

Day4 part 'deux'
Wow. What a day. Heart rate racing, crazy west coast single track (Stu is
learning very fast to be fast in a trial by fire !), and we felt lots of
power. Both Stu and Trevor felt great in fact and we pushed hard right to
the end. Today was 58km only and elevation gain of 1325m, but it was
exceptional from Earls Cover ferry to Seychelt, after 2 ferry rides from
Comox. We felt good by beating 2 'yellow jersey' teams for BC Bike Race
categories: the open-womens team and the veterens-100 team plus the Toronto
guys. Yes .... we were very happy to beat some girls and a couple of over 50
year olds.... They are incredibly strong and crazy impressive atheletes
actually. The race leaders usually beat us by 1 to 1.5hrs - don't know how
they do that. Today moved up 11 places in the overall standings, so we are
happy with that. Tomorrow is a tougher day 5, apparently a classic route
from Seychelt to Gibsons with fully half as single track. We plan to be
'solid' but not hammer it too much, since day6 is going to be brutal by all
accounts (Sqaumish to Whistler Checkamus Challenge ). People train
exclusively for just that one day race! We had dinner in the Seychelt nation
long house, and the dufas' ran out of food and brought in KFC... Nice.