Day 0: Getting to Mt Hotham
Hello everyone. It’s my pleasure to bring you the first instalment of my daily blog for the 2017 Tour de Cure Signature charity ride. Before I get started on the update since leaving home I wanted to quickly provide all the stat hungry folks out there the summary of my TdC training program from just before Xmas. So here’s what went down…
Distance ridden: 3,800km
Time on bike: 7,315 minutes
Metres of elevation climbed: 24,365m
Calories burned: 78,365 (that’s about 305 Big Mac equivalents)
Going high tech this year and I will be adding short video updates as well – links will be provided to Dazza’s Diary.
OK, so Day 0 is all about getting to the start line, wherever you may live. It proved to be a bit challenging this year due to weather conditions in the 2 airports people needed to get to – Melbourne and Mt Hotham. Flights to Melbourne were delayed by a couple of hours due to dangerously low cloud. The charter flight to Mt Hotham from Sydney was cancelled due to bad weather and this flight had to be redirected to Albury and a bus from there. My coach trip from Melbourne to Hotham took about 4 hours but that gave everyone a chance to catch up. The first time riders were a bit nervous and had lots of questions about what to expect. There was some spectacular scenery enroute.
We finally arrived, got ourselves sorted out, got our bikes assembled, found our rooms then headed to the Mt Hotham pub for our first full team briefing, dinner and some formalities.
We presented the first community $10,000 cheque for the Tour to the local Camp Quality organisation. In fact we bumped this up to $15,000. Local communities are so grateful for this support and such funding is very difficult to come by.
I was privileged to be the guest speaker for the night where I spoke to the 180+ people in attendance about my personal cancer journey and challenges. A very forgiving and understanding bunch I have to say – no heckling at all!!! 🙂
After the formalities were completed everyone was pretty keen to get to bed. It had been a long day and it was going to be an even longer day tomorrow. There was a fair bit of praying to the weather gods going on also!
That’s it for Day 0. Stay tuned.
(Oh, by the way. There’s rumour that our roving reporter Willymaykit is back again this year and will be with us from tomorrow.)
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