Ready for Penticton Granfondo

Penticton – June 30    Yesterday we cycled up the road to Apex Mountain. The road is quiet, the surface not bad for a secondary route, and the grade is what we wanted in this last weekend before the Granfondo.  (The entire ride was 50km, the time to the turnaround point was about 90 minutes, the time home less than 45 minutes.  Whee!!)  So far this month, we have ridden just over 400km, tackled all the hills on the course at least once, done other miscellaneous hills, had new tires installed on our bikes, and feel ready for the ride.  The only thing we haven’t trained in is extreme heat.  The weather here has been fairly cool, but it could quite easily be 35C on the day of the race.  Managing this type of heat is tricky.  The nice thing about a supported ride, like the Granfondo, is that you don’t have to take all your water with you, but apart from drinking water you need to make sure your electrolyte levels are ok (salt), keep the nutrition up (carbs), keep the energy up (calories) and finally do all the above without getting nauseous.  There are lots of specifically designed products for nutrition, but we like things that are simpler and not too chemically.  We will take along some small roasted potatoes, which Michaela used to get her through the marathon portion of Ironman, Kendall mint cakes, which reliably and very tastily provide a whole bunch of sugar, and (something we just discovered yesterday) pretzels from the Penticton Farmers Market.  Delicious.