March 20, 2009 – Seven Canadian National Team athletes arrived in Santiago, Chile on Wednesday to prepare for this weekend’s Pan American MTB Championships. Catharine Pendrel (BC), Amanda Sin (ON), Emily Batty (ON), Matt Hadley (NB), Derek Zandstra (ON), Max Plaxton (BC), and Seamus McGrath (BC) are all set to race the XC on Sunday. The race course is located 20km from downtown Santiago at an elevation of 1100m. One lap consists of 5km, 80% of which is singletrack, while the remaining 20% is doubletrack.

Pendrel, who placed second in the 2006 Pan Am Championships, is aiming for gold this year. She wrote on her blog the day the team arrived in Chile:

You know it’s race season when… doping control comes to visit you twice in 14hrs for samples!

I’m now sitting in a house way up in the mountains of Santiago, Chile. The 7 member Pan American team flew into Chile this morning. 3 hrs after arriving at the airport and a $200 fine later for Matt [Hadley] who forgot to declare a bag of raisins we were packed into minivans and headed out of the city smog and into the mountains.

UP, up, up we climbed until we reached over 3000 m of elevation on a road that became more and more winding with each Kilometre. About 40 switchbacks later, we turned onto gravel and bridged many water bars in our rentals vehicles with only a couple scraping noises to find our accommodations!

We moved into our cozy home complete with our care takers Cathy y Alexis that will cook and clean for us. The only catch is they only speak Spanish, which just means I get to practice lots! The cabin is a ski in and ski out in winter and could be right out of Switzerland. There’s barely a tree in sight, just lots of mountains.

It felt great to get out the bike, until we started climbing… which was one of our two options. Up or down. The air was definitely thin and the legs feeling a bit sluggish, but it’s day 1 and we are in shorts!

Tomorrow we’ll descend back down 20km of switch backs to about 1200m and the race venue.

Visit Pendrel’s blog at www.cpendrel.blogspot.com