The fourth and final day of the relay and I have to admit the feelings were bittersweet. I was happy to be headed to Calgary; I have been missing my family and it was thrilling that the relay had been so successful so far, and that we all rode so well, but I'm already missing all the great new people I met, and I'm really missing the awesome group riding.
Shift 1 was not the opening shift, but the second shift of the day. We got on about 30km east of Golden, about 2/3 of the way up the hill to Kicking Horse Pass. It was a cold morning, only 4 degrees when we started, but we quickly warmed up with the hills! A stunning leg, as we rode over rolling hills atop the Rocky Mountains, headed to the BC/Alberta border. We passes pristine lakes, full of sky blue water, and didn't have to look far up to find snow. Our shift ended just shy of the border, after 31km of riding.
We were in Canmore, AB, before we had a chance to ride again, and this one would be our final shift before arriving in Calgary. Canmore is such a cute little town, and the landscape just east of it, with the jutting rock-face mountains perched atop the dry grasses of the prairies, was absolutely breathtaking. A bonus presented itself to us early on this leg: tailwind!! We hadn't had any tailwind in BC, but man did we ever have some in Alberta! Our average pace for this leg was over 30km/hour and 50km/hr was not hard to come by on the flats. We got a whopping 1:42:00 for this leg and sped over 51km before packing it in approximately 60km west of Calgary. Total for day 4 was 82km.
My personal riding total for the 4 days: 351km! My original plan was to aim for 100km per day on days 2-4, and 50-60km on day 1, so this is pretty much exactly what I had hoped to ride!
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