July 11.  North Vancouver is famed for it’s mountain biking.  There’s a saying: The Californians created the mountain bike, but North Vancouver created mountain biking.  It’s tough miles; super technical with rocks, ruts, drops, rollers and tight squeezes.

As I’m not a super confident technical rider, I knew that today was going to be tough.  On the other hand, I was thankful for the significant reduction in miles.

Instead of our typical waves of 100 riders per group – we started off in waves of 25.  The start immediately kicked us over a narrow bridge, and I was thankful that there was not too many people to jockey with.

As normal, the day started with a nice long climb.  The course was only 18km, but the organizers were still going to get 817m of climbing out of us!

I would like to say that I did better than I thought I’d do today, but I can’t say that without lying.  The day was technically tough.  There was a rock face that I walked down.  I was tired from the previous four days of tough riding… and I just couldn’t mentally push myself through the tough spots.

AND it was a ton of fun.  Because we were so close to Vancouver, there was entertainment everywhere. There were blow up dinosaurs, penguins, and many more characters to keep me entertained as I pedaled along. It was great and often made me forget how tired I was.

Getting back to the park that we started, I washed and dropped off my bike for transport, took a great shower, ate like I don’t care about my figure and napped in the grass.  Five days – done!  I could feel that I was so close to the finish line, but didn’t want to get too excited.  I knew that tomorrow would be another long, tough day.

We boarded buses (this time, nice coaches instead of school buses!) and traveled off to Squamish.

I’d never been to Squamish before, and was immediately blown away by it’s beauty.  I knew instantly that I wanted to come back, and that was even more reinforced my Stage 6’s ride…