tour de victoria rider bible

Ryder Hesjedal's Tour de Victoria presented by Scotiabank

A ride for everyone!!

All ages. All abilities. All bikes.

ONLINE REGISTRATION NOW CLOSED.

We are happy to announce a date change for the 2021 Ryder Hesjedal’s Tour de Victoria presented by Scotiabank .

We have moved the ride from August 21st to October 2nd . Early October is a great time to ride the scenic roads of Greater Victoria.

We will continue to monitor all government regulations dictated by the BC Provincial Health Authority and ensure all safety precautions are followed to ensure a safe event.

- We look forward to riding with you in October! -

Ryder Hesjedal’s Tour de Victoria presented by Scotiabank is a traffic-controlled, fully supported, mass-participation cycling event in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. Experience the world-class cycling routes and breathtaking scenery. Riders of all fitness levels can take part in the ride by choosing one of eight distances.

All rides start and finish in the iconic inner harbour of Victoria at the BC's Legislative Buildings.

What's Included

Your registration includes:

• A world class cycling route with stunning scenery!
• Limited edition Tour de Victoria swag!
• Traffic controlled course
• Fully supported aid stations
• Chip timing
• Mechanical support
• Broom wagon service
• Medical support
• A boxed meal waiting for you at the finish line
• Pop or soda from Spinnaker's at the finish line
• Secure bike parking during post-event festivities
• Gifts and special offers from our sponsors

Pricing Schedule

April 30th and July 31st price changes take effect at 11:59pm. Online registration closes on September 30, 2021, at 11:30am.

Onsite registration is available at Rider Check-In.

COVID - 19 Safety protocols

Covid-19 interim rules....

In order to host a safe edition of this year’s Tour de Victoria, we have developed special protocols to prevent the spread of Covid 19 at our event. We have identified pinch points associated with our event, where these protocols will assist in our goal. We will also rigidly follow the directions of the Provincial Health Organization at the time of the event. We believe that by following these protocols, and the direction of the PHO that the event can be run safely this year. The event is held exclusively outdoors, including package pickup. The date of the event has changed from Aug 21st to Oct 2nd this year. We chose this later date to coordinate with the province of BC’s covid 19 vaccination schedule.

General Measures: -Riders will be required to wear masks at start line and at aid stations -Volunteers will be required to wear masks -Increased hand sanitizing stations throughout the footprint of the event -PPE items available throughout the footprint of the event -We require the use of masks when riders aren’t riding and can’t physically distance

Transfers, Refunds and Deferrals

All registrations are non-refundable. There are no exceptions.

Covid Policy: In case the event gets cancelled or postponed due to covid all registrations will be transferred to the 2022 event.

We are a small organization and Tour de Victoria planning requires us to prepare all year long. With that we are unable to offer refunds, However, we recognize that injuries and unforeseen events come up, so we have a few options if you:

Distance Changes

• For info on how to change your distance (transfers to another sub-event), please click here .
• When changing distance you will be charged any difference in price based on the date you registered
• There are no refunds on price difference when changing to a shorter distance
• There is a $15 processing fee applied for all distance changes
• Distance changes can be made online before September 17, 2021. After which, all changes must be made at Rider Check-In on Friday, October 1st, 2021.

Transfers To Another Person

• For info on how to complete the transfer to another person, please click here
• There is a $15.00 processing fee applied for all transfers to another person
• These can be done anytime before September 17, 2021. After which, all changes must be made at Rider Check-In on Friday, October 1st, 2021.

Deferrals To Another Year

• Email [email protected] to request a deferral to 2022
• A $50 processing fee will be applied when you redeem your registration the following year
• If the ride gets cancelled or postponed due to covid there will be no deferral fee
• Deferral requests must be received by September 17, 2021

- No Exceptions -

Deferrals from 2020

If you chose to defer from our 2020 event that got postponed due to COVID you received an email with your unique code to register. If you did not receive an email check your junk folder, if still nothing contact us at [email protected] *

You have the option to use this code for the 2021 Ryder Hesjedal's Tour de Victoria presented by Scotiabank. The limit to use the code for our 2021 evet is July 31, 2021.

If you do not use your code for 2021, don't worry, that same code will be good to use in our 2022 ride. If you want to use it for 2022, you do not need to do anything.

Simply wait for a new email once we open registration for 2022.

*from September 24 to October 4th support@ will not be monitored often.

Youth Riders

Youth ride for $25.

In support of youth cycling development, we are pleased to offer subsidized registration for all riders age 18 & under for all distances. Pricing will be adjusted to $25 for all distances during registration and you'll be required to answer additional questions during registration. This excludes kid's ride, which is free!

Youth riders can choose the distance of their choice, but must abide by the following:

• Pre-approval form required for riders 18 and under. Fill & sign, send it to [email protected] if you are 18 or under and wish to ride the 160km.

140km, 100km, 60km:

• Riders age 16 and older may ride unsupervised
• Riders age 15 and under must ride with an adult supervisor at all times

45km, 30km, 15km:

• Riders age 11 and older may ride unsupervised
• Riders age 10 and under must ride with an adult supervisor at all times. If you do not have an adult supervisor, we will provide a chaperone for you.

All riders age 18 and under must have their waiver signed in person by a parent/guardian at Rider Check-In

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Tour de Victoria: A Very Long Bike Ride with Friendly Strangers

June 1, 2011

Second Chances for the Land of Queenie

Here is what I used to know about Victoria:

Tea Queen Parliament Big gardens I could care less about Buskers (god, I even hate that word ) Boats and water ferries Bad trip with college boyfriend and his mom involving tea, previously mentioned dumb gardens and a Christmas Shoppe Tourists!!

Parliament at night. Taken with Yashica T4 on Ilford B&W Film.

Parliament Building and Queen with tourists. Yashica T4/Ilford

Besides the bad college-boyfriend trip of infamy, the last time I was in Victoria was last summer during one of my solo bike tours. I’d ridden north from Portland and had just come across on a ferry. After clearing customs, I was dumped out into a mass of mindless, touristy humanity on the city’s inner harbor. I’ll be honest with you: I freaked out. Then I did what seemed safest – I got on my big, heavy bicycle and pedaled out of town as fast as humanly possible.

It wasn’t really fair to Victoria, but I did what I had to do. The next day I followed the Galloping Goose Trail and connected to the Lochside Trail system to ride up the coast toward the ferry that would take me to Vancouver. It was one of the best days of the tour. The trail took me through farmland and coastline and gravely passages covered in green canopy. It was lovely. And amazing.

I vowed to give Victoria another chance.

That chance came a few days ago, when I paid the old island a visit for a big bike ride with 1500 friendly strangers. (The Tour de Victoria is a 140k ride that covers the most beautiful roads in Victoria and its surrounding towns .)

Bike Boxes Win Friends and Influence People

(Or at least just make good conversation pieces.)

Having never flown alone with my bike before, I commissioned a Bike Packing Boot Camp session from my favorite wrench (that one boy what lives with me in my house and brings me coffee in the morning). After showing me the ropes, he forced me to disassemble, pack and the re-assemble my bike twice to make sure I knew what I was doing. Apparently, I was convincing because he gave me a bike-packing merit badge and dropped me off at the airport.

Traveling with a big bike box seems to draw a lot of attention and most of the conversations I had went like this:

Them: Hey, what’s in that huge box?

Me: Bike. (I enjoyed saying “Bike” instead of “a bike”. As if Bike were a proper noun. It doesn’t take much to amuse me.)

NO WAY! A bike??! What is it like one of those ones that folds up or something?

[Me looking at the HUGE box kinda funny] No, it’s just a regular bike. A road bike.

NO WAY! How did you get it in there?

You have to take it all apart and then stack it together. It’s like a tetris game but with more grease.

Ha! So, you take it apart… like with a wrench?

Yeah, kind of like that. Handlebars and seat and wheels and pedals come off. You take off the derailleur too. (I started to lose them here, so I’d stop talking.)

Well, I’ll be….

From the Famous Last Words Department…

The weather didn’t look very promising when I left Portland, so I packed a fender. If I pack a fender, I reasoned, then it will be sunny for sure!

I was feeling very smug and sneaky the next day when I woke up to a report that said it was going to be partly cloudy and mostly dry during the day of the race. Victoria better be thanking me for my fender black magic, I thought. I turned my two-room, two-balcony suite at the Grand Pacific Hotel into a bike shop and reassembled Bike. Then I moved the coffee maker to the bedstand, set it up and set an alarm for 5:00am. In the morning I rolled over, punched the button and waited for the smell to hit me.

Hotel room bike shop. Yashica T4/Ilford.

When I woke up I thought, It’s a good day for a long bike ride with 1500 strangers.

On the start line I chatted up a lovely couple. The announcer bellowed and hollered and it was exciting, though I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. Then a gun went off or a horn blew or something loud happened and we were rolling. As we went under the starting banner I could finally understand the announcer who said things like, “look at the mass of humanity rolling through downtown Victoria!” and “incredible crowd!” and “Good luck!”

I reached back and patted my pocket to double check my food supplies only to discover that I’d forgotten them in the hotel room.

No worries. The first feed zone is at 40k. I can ride 40k without calories, no problem.

Meat Sticks and Mud

I prefer to ride alone , but when you’re in a recreational group ride, the point is to relish the togetherness and camaraderie. Riding with people is a quintessential cycling experience – an act that bonds us and brings our consciousness beyond our own suffering. I’d come to the ride alone, but I hoped to find a group to call home.

25 kilometers in, I began to yo-yo with a group of three women who were mixed intermittently in with a pod of men. I couldn’t tell exactly where the alliances were, so I stayed close and paid attention. The woman in gray hammered on the flats. The woman in red pulled away on the climbs. Eventually, I introduced myself to the climber and we rode together a while. She stopped for a nature break and I kept riding, eager to find the first feed zone and get some calories rolling.

Eventually, I realized that I’d manage to miss it all together – my computer read 50k and I still hadn’t eaten. No one else had seen it either, so two gentleman took pity on me and fed me. They got me through the worst of the climbs, a section of the route referred to as the Highlands: punchy, steep hills on narrow roads through wooded countryside. Stunning and spooky with sharp turns that sent at least one rider careening over a barrier and down a hillside.

When we emerged from the Highlands, the Climber in Red caught me. We sat up together and waited for her companions and when they arrived she introduced me. We worked together. It started to rain. Hard. We stopped to put on jackets and The Climber fed me cured meat.

“Be careful with that meat!” laughed Gray Vest, “She keeps it in her bra!”

Gray Vest had a name: Mary. Mary the Mountain Biker.

The rain came down harder and when we hit a grade I decided not to let The Climber get away again. I sat on her wheel eating mud and water, then took a shift dragging her up the second half of the hill. Sitting in back while a steady spray came off my back wheel she said, “UFF! I think I liked it better up there!” No one had fenders. It wasn’t supposed to rain.

At the second feed zone (kilometer 75) we filled our bottles with water and our pockets with food. It was the last time we stopped to rest, choosing to blow through the final two feed zones in favor of finishing faster.

We’re Winning

On long rides, I always get better as I go along – it takes me a good 35 miles to really start feeling good. There is a point where the legs begin to feel disconnected from me – almost numb. I look down and they are turning over like pistons – 85 or 90 RPM. Tick, tick, tick, tick. The connection between my body, my bike and the road is seamless and I feel like I can ride forever.

That happened to me this time, but I could tell my group was starting to feel the pain. I started to drop The Climber when the road tilted up. The pace on the flat sections eased a little bit. We chatted and laughed. We hit and off-road gravel section and came out of it looking like battle-weary cyclocross racers, faces and bodies covered in mud.

As we got closer to Victoria, the volunteers who were controlling traffic (a rolling enclosure for a recreational ride – amazing!!) became more and more animated. At the top of a steep but short hill, one ran alongside me, clapping and cheering. The corner marshals told us we looked strong. The cadets who were stationed at each corner throughout Oak Bay cheered like they meant it.

Somewhere up the road in Victoria, Ryder Hesjedal was finished and showered. Here we were straggling in hours later and the crowds made us feel like we were winning.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

By the time we rolled under the finishing banner, we didn’t feel that way anymore . Weary and cold (my companions all had numb hands from wet gloves – it’s worth noting that though my $18 wool DeFeet gloves soaked all the way through, my hands stayed warm until to the bitter end), we rallied a bystander to take a picture of us.

The lens on my phone camera was fogged from condensation and the resulting image says just about everything there was to say about our ride:

This is absolutely the only photo I have from the entire day.

I said my goodbyes, pedaled around to the back of my hotel and took off my outer layer of socks, which was caked in grime. Holding my shoes and socks in one hand and bike in the other I tried (unsuccessfully) to sneak in unnoticed by hotel staff. Luckily, they smiled at me instead of beating me with my own carbon fiber and then making me clean up the watery footprints I was leaving.

In the room I realized I had no recovery food (I didn’t play this nutrition thing very well, huh?) so I scarfed a bar I’d been handed as a promo on the finish line, jumped into a neck-deep tub of hot, hot water and tried not to scream as the embrocation re-ignited to varying degrees of fiery hell. (ok, I admit it, I kinda like it when that happens. Pain is my pleasure.)

One tw0-hour nap and a very muddy sink later I was ready to rock. Ryder Hesjedal and the Tour de Victoria crew hosted a salmon barbeque on the top floor of the Parkside Resort and Spa which was filled with free booze, hot pro cyclists and really, really awesome local cycling advocates and organizers who filled me in on the state of trail projects, the upcoming Bike to Work Week initiative and what it really took to put together a ride like the Tour de Victoria.

Glory stories and celebration were the order of the day.

I walked home exhausted, stopped at a 7-11 for Kinder Eggs and cream for my morning coffee, and then collapsed with the city winking outside the window.

Muddy sink. (Yashica T4/Ilford)

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5 Responses to “Tour de Victoria: A Very Long Bike Ride with Friendly Strangers”

Swift! You can’t let your chainrings touch the rug in the hotel room! OMG!

Had a shop rag underneath! OMG! :)

Whew. You know these things keep me awake at night.

OMG! I am so jealous. Sounds awesome. Except for the rain. I will need to get used to riding in the rain, though, won’t I?

I want to go to a post-ride party with hot pro cyclists. Boo.

I have been reading your blog for a while, I was shocked to find out that I was one of the 1499 other riders at the Tour de Victoria. As a young cyclist who’s career began three years ago in high school in Victoria, I know many of those pro cyclist, some of them were my mentors, and taught me to love the sport of bike racing. The ride was like big reunion for me, catching up with all my friends from the development team there, and then finding out one of my favourite bolggers was out there with me that day made it even better!

Glad to hear you finished! (Real cyclist go harder when the going gets tough.)

• Meg Cuthbert
• Aug 23, 2019

Ryder Hesjedal’s Tour de Victoria - 60k Ride Report

Every August the Tour de Victoria rides through Victoria and the Saanich peninsula (and even Metchosin). This event is a ride, not a race and with the tagline, “a ride for everyone” the Tour de Victoria is open to all cyclists, casual commuters and anyone else who wants ride.

Offering distances between 15 and 160 kilometres, everyone can take part in the event from kids to people on cruisers, to sponsored teams with bikes that weigh less than a water bottle.

My brother purchased my entry for my birthday, and my Dad decided to join us. We rode the 60-kilometre option because I’ve been neglecting all my bikes for months. It was a good distance for us to ride comfortably without training, and still get a good ride in. The longer distances had more serious riders participating. It was a bit hard on the ego when a pack (swarm) of riders doing the 140k or 160k distances would buzz past us like we were standing still (they had been riding for an extra two hours). But we made up for that by spending more time at the aid stations eating candy.

The 60k option is a relaxed ride with a good mix of riders. Some people are clipped in and wearing full kit, while others are wearing t-shirts and are riding old steel frame bikes -- it's a ride for everyone.

The Tour de Victoria does an excellent job mapping the course. Starting from the Legislature building right down in Victoria’s inner harbour, the ride claims an entire lane of traffic. The designated lane allows the thousands of riders to all have space to ride a safe distance from each other and traffic.

The 60k route flows through downtown Victoria and winds around to Saanich. The route crosses the Pat Bay highway just above Elk Lake and then begins its oceanside descent into Caddy Bay and along Dallas Road back to the Legislature.

The route has three aid stations — all equipped with fancy gels and electrolytes as well as peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

From the secluded farmland on the peninsula to cruising stretches through Mount Doug Park and the seaside riding, the 60-kilometre route is perfect for anyone looking for a fun Saturday ride.

The inclusivity of this ride is what makes it so fun. From old clunkers to bikes worth more than most cars, this ride is for everyone. It ends with a barbeque and beer garden at the Legislature, where there’s also massage stations and a bouncy castle (depending on what kind of recovery you need). Victoria is known for being a cycling town, and I think this event is a pillar in that cycling community.

And most importantly, the t-shirts for this event are great. This year the swag also included socks and a water bottle (all of excellent quality).

It’s a great ride and a great community event. Next year we’ll put some work in and register for the 100k.

#Races #BritishColumbia #VancouverIsland #Bikes #Canada

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Photos and story: Record number for Tour de Victoria

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The number of cyclists taking part in Ryder Hesjedal’s Tour de Victoria hit a record on Saturday as local and international participants turned out for a day that delivered perfect weather.

“This is a huge destination event,” Seamus McGrath, race director, said Saturday.

“We have people from Australia, Malaysia, the U.K., Ireland, Spain, tonnes of people from the (United) States come up, and people from across Canada.”

More than 60 per cent of this year’s 1,800 participants came from outside Greater Victoria, he said.

McGrath believes the numbers of riders increased because more rides were added, giving cyclists the opportunity to cover 160, 140, 100, 60, 30, 15, or seven kilometre distances. As well, the ride was moved to Saturday from Sunday, which allowed riders from out of town to remain overnight and experience Victoria.

Riders ranged in age from two to 80 years of age, he said.

Weather was “perfect. It was 23 degrees and sunny,” McGrath said.

“Views of the Olympics (mountains) popped open for the first time in weeks. There was no smoke. There was no wind. It was a cyclist’s dream.”

He expects the charity Opportunity International will take in about $30,000 from the event. The amount isn’t known yet for the second charity being supported, Ryder’s Cycling Society of Canada, but last year it received about $10,000, McGrath said. Ryder’s Cycling Society supports youth cycling initiatives.

Hesjedal, who rode competitively until 2016, took part in the 160 km ride and is thrilled with the participation numbers.

“It was incredible,” he said.

“It is the biggest yet. I think that speaks a lot about the cycling community and cycling in general.

“It’s a lot of work and a lot of effort to make this kind of day happen for the cycling community,” said Hesjedal, who praised the support from the community in general. The event is supported by 230 volunteers.

“It brings people together and that’s what it is about. It’s good energy and it’s nice to be a part of.”

First time participant Ash Gillan ,5, was excited about the free afternoon children’s ride along 400 metres in an enclosed area.

The Saanich youngster already races his BMX. “This is a chance for him to try road racing to see what it is all about,” said mum Roslyn Gillan.

Ash said he has been riding “a lot of days.” He began riding at age four and on his bike daily, said Roslyn, who has taken up cycling to ride with Ash.

Buzz Fogal, 73 years old from Campbell River, completed his seventh Tour de Victoria this year.

“It was a great day. The weather was fantastic,” Fogal said after his 30-km ride.

Lila Nabi, 42, arrived in Victoria with friends from her Bullhearts cycling group of West Vancouver. She completed her 100 km ride in slightly more than four hours.

“It was tough,” she said, referring to the route’s many hills and acute corners. But she is “absolutely” returning next year. “I’m going to train harder next time.”

On Munn Road, another cyclist appeared to have collided with a vehicle. She waited until he sat up and police attended. West Shore RCMP and ride officials did not have word on the rider’s condition.

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