This is a race that has been on my to do list for the last several years. It’s a bit different than the “what now has become the average” multi day mountain bike endurance race like the TransAlp and the TransRockies. This one is limited to just 60 riders and is “hotel to hotel” rather than camping along the way. The organizing committee takes great pride in making the race very personal for the racers. They are extremely proud of their country and go to great lengths to make sure that the racers get a significant flavor of the areas that they are riding through. There are two further quirks. The race is GPS guided. (i.e. the course is unmarked) In the morning, the organizers slip a SD card into your GPS unit and then say “go”. It is also unsupported so you must be completely self sufficient; so much so that any water needed along the way must be found or purchased. It is also handicapped for age and gender, giving us old guys a running chance at hanging with the young bucks.I first heard about this race from a fellow Whistler rider in 2007. She had done the race in the spring of 2007, and raved about the quality of the organization. The race sells out fast, so that when I tried to enter in 2008, I ended up on the waitlist. I was on my to the Cape Epic in South Africa in March of 2008 when I received an email informing me that my name was up on the waitlist, and I was in if I wanted to go. Too many races too close together that year, so unfortunately I had to beg off. Last year, I concentrated on road riding and the TourTransalp, so this year TransPortugal was number 1 on my list.
Over the years I have talked this race up among my friends, and in the end we have a great group of seven riders from the Vancouver area heading over. This group includes my 20 year old daughter, who literally wrote her last first year university exam in Calgary less that 36 hours before she was on the airplane out of Vancouver.
The race is 9 days long (the longest race I have ever done) and will cover close to 1200 km. We start pretty much on the north border of Portugal and before we finish on the southern beaches of the Algarve we will have climbed about 20,000m. My daughter tells me that that elevation gain is about the same as climbing from sea level to the top of Mt. Everest 3 times. Why does she have to make it so dramatic???
For all of us, getting ready for the race has been a real challenge. It is difficult at the best of times to be in peak physical shape this early in the season, and with the Olympics in Vancouver this winter, all of us had a very difficult time getting in our training. Many of the local XC ski resorts were closed for a good portion of the winter because of Olympic events, so cross training was challenging. When challenges present themselves it is always good to think outside the box, so a few of us tryed some high altitude training on snow. Pretty sweet!
Riding a bike in Vancouver in the winter can result in a lot of wet days. It seems to me that I have not seen dry road in months. Even a early April road training trip to California resulted in several days of torrential rain inter mixed with some great sunny days.
I am looking forward to the challenges that will meet us in Portugal. Stay tuned for the results.
