BC Bike Race Observations

• Facts - 500 riders, 21 countries represented
• Facts - 338 km of riding and just under 10,000 meters of climbing over the week!
• Open atmosphere - Everyone was very friendly (volunteers and riders).  It was great to meet new people from all over the world every day 
• Glad I did the event with Hersey!  He once again re-affirmed why he is one tough dude...
• It was really cool to do this event with a friend and have someone to share the experience with.
• We hung out a lot with Scott and John from Calgary and got to know them over the course of the week
• After the mass craziness of the 'neutral start', things would flush out and you would somehow end up riding with the same circle of riders almost every day
• We ended up running into and hanging out with similar circles most of the time.
• Weather - we lucked out!  There were a couple of sprinkles here and there but nothing that impacted the trails too much
• Awesome Organization!  Something like this entails tons of planning for logistics and they did a great job of getting the riders and gear to where it needed to be
• Technical Terrain.  The trails were much more difficult than I had anticipated.  It took me a couple of days to get back into that mode of riding tekkie
• Caliber of Athletes.  The caliber of riders there was very impressive - former olympians and olympic medalists
• Riding 7 days straight is physically demanding
• Riding 7 days straight is mentally demaning
• Everyone had at least 1 bad day where the legs just did not want to ride and the body fought you the whole way
• Food was generally pretty good
• Any mechanical work done by Obsession was spendy $$$$
• There was a fair amount of hurry up and wait...hurry to get somewhere and then you had to wait for an hour until the ferry loaded, etc...
• I would highly recommend this to others
• It is expensive once you include travel and meals
• Schwag was awesome - you get what you pay for : )
• Stage Racing is hard!
• It was an amazing and yet humbling experience.
• Race pace for 7 days toughens you up!
• Props to local riders - they are some bad ass riders who ride gnarly stuff
• It did not take long to look around and notice consequences of bad wrecks!  broken teeth, lacerations, etc...
• I will definitely be going back to visit some of the places we rode - there are more trails to be ridden and more exploring to be had
• TONS of work went into these trails - ladders, berms, jumps...THANKS to the trail-builders!
• The towns we stayed in were very welcoming (with one of exception of a drunken dude in a bar who wanted to pick a fight)
• This might have just been the coolest thing I have done on a bike!