Today we got up at 7:30 in the morning, feeling calm. Today will be a quiet day and will spend it getting acquainted to the place, without competing until tomorrow, Tuesday the 6th.
We’ve had breakfast; a luxury breakfast. Unlike Morocco, here there is a lot of variety, from eggs, pasta, pancakes with chocolate, fruit, nuts, and some cakes… delicious. At the moment, we are eating more than pedaling.
We’ve just finished breakfast, and we’re going to find our bike at the collection point to assemble it, in 15 minutes we’ve done it. I thought it would be more difficult, but Itó already knows what it’s about.
We go to get the bike equipment and go to explore the area, basically as tourists, since we don’t follow what the track says, but go in the opposite direction along the Red Sea and arriving at a small port with beautiful fishermen boats, where we take a few photos and continue on a track with a little sand but easy to pedal. We keep going until we see a small dune and head there to ride it up and down like little kids on a bike, with spectacular views from the top.
In the end we do about 20 km to stretch our legs, we arrive and take our bibs at the limit of the allowed time.
It’s almost 2pm, we shower and go to lunch. The truth is that here in Arabia the equipment is quite luxurious. In the afternoon we relax in the central tent that is installed in the Athlete Village, which is full of huge comfortable cushions, a huge carpet of very elegant cream color and TV’s everywhere showing Titan documentaries and broadcasting the world football cup.
At 6pm we pay the deposit for the SPOT which is the geolocator that we must always carry with us, even though they had problems at customs and we will have to pick them up tomorrow at 6am.
At 18:30 we are given the briefing for tomorrow’s stage, which will be very fast, but with quite a bit of headwind throughout the stage which will make 107 km more tough.
At 19:30 we have dinner, we socialize a bit, we go to the central tent to chat for a while, I prepare things for tomorrow, so I don’t have to think about it in the morning and get nervous. And off to bed, the alarm clock rings tomorrow at 6 AM!
