The hardest day on the bike

As I type this I (Brandon) am sitting outside my hotel, which happens to be conveniently located at the finish of stage four of the 2011 Transalp in St. Vigil, Italy. It is 6:00pm in the evening and there are still teams crossing the finish line. We started at 9:00am. For those of you who can’t do the math, that is nine hours on the bike! For most of the Transalp competitors these difficult stages are some of the most enduring days they will ever experience on a bicycle. After the pros, masters and serious amatuers have finished, the enthusiasts come in by the dozens.

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Pete Webber and Brandon Dwight are racing the TransAlp mountain bike stage race in Europe from July 16-23, 2011.  This blog follows their adventures just before and during the eight-day competition.

Webber, 41, is a longtime bike racer from Boulder, Colorado, USA, who rides for the well-known local team Boulder Cycle Sport. He was a pro mountain bike and cyclo-cross racer during the 90s and rode World Cups and world championships for Team Gary Fisher. As a masters athlete, he is two-time US Cyclo-cross National Champion. On the mountain bike, he won the 2010 US Master Marathon National Championships.

Webber is also a longtime bike advocate and trail builder, and worked for the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) for the past 10 years. His many supporters include his wife Sally and 8-year-old daughter Ella.

Dwight, 39, also from the US, is the co-owner of Boulder Cycle Sport, a popular Colorado bicycle shop with two locations and three times voted a "Top 100 Shop" in the USA. He was a pro/elite mountain biker and cyclo-cross rider on the American circuit during the 90s and 00s and is a two-time US Cyclo-cross Masters National Champion. He is also the founder of Doperssuck.com. Dwight lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife Heather and one-year-old daughter Maggie.