Beth drove and we picked Kelly up at 6:00am. We were told to be there for registration at 6:30am, and we're early birds so we arrived when we were told.
It was a tad early! Anyway, I guess that's a rookie mistake as we didn't end up leaving until about 9:00am! We sure looked fresh and ready to go!
After registering (which took 30 seconds), we sat down to our second breakfast of the day with our team: Kelly Greene, Paul Rosenberg (Kelly's travelling chiropractor!), Rob Givens and myself - team "Chain Reaction". Also in this picture is "Cat", who we rode with on Days 1 and 4.
There was some entertainment followed by speeches from the organizers who level set everybody and reminded us what we were really there for: helping kids with cancer. It was pretty emotional, and it reminded me that recovering from an accident like I did was nothing even close to what these kids go through on a daily basis - and most of the kids go through cancer treatment and recovery (if they're lucky) for 3-7 years! Wow. It was inspiring.
Since I had agreed to be a marshall, I was assigned a pace group to stay with. Marshalling entailed helping people stay in a group, helping with mechanicals like flat tires and also carrying a first aid kid and emergency numbers. On day, I was assigned to the 2nd fastest group (the fast guys didn't have marshalls!).
Here was the route for today. Basically, straight up to Barrie for lunch at 110km, and then up through Orillia to Bracebridge. The destination was a KOA campground there.
The pace was pretty quick, but the route was relatively flat, and we had a big group so it was fairly easy going. My neck was bothering me a bit, but the adrenalin kept it at bay (oh, and a few Advil). I later found that the real difference between pace groups is that the faster pace groups seemed to be the types of people who would drop anyone. Several times people dropped water bottles and were forced to chase back up to the pack. It was pretty cutthroat.
We arrived at about 5:00pm and hustled into the campground to get a massage and some dinner. We weren't that hungry, surprisingly, and had to really force the food and water down, knowing we would need it the next day. My computer said I'd burned through about 12,000 calories, but I felt pretty good.
This may look like we were ready to set up our tents and camp for the night, but we were actually waiting for the hotel shuttle! We felt a little snobby, but we had booked a hotel for the night in hopes that we would have a nice relaxing night and so we wouldn't have to worry about setting up tents etc.
The hotel may not look it based on the picture below... but to us, it was like staying in a five-star hotel. A room to yourself, hot shower, nice bed - after 227km in the saddle, it was awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment