I'm Pace and McElvin and this is the WithPace podcast.

Hey everyone, I wanted to jump on here quickly and just knock out a little gravel burn preview

episode. I'll keep it short and sweet. I won't even make you get through any ads or anything.

But with seven stage recap episodes coming up in succession here over the next week,

I thought it might be nice to set the stage a little bit. And also, after going to the venue

this morning and just kind of

being floored by the professional of this professionalism of this race already, the scope, the hype,

I'm just kind of feeling a bit inspired by what the gravel burn team is doing. And yeah, I just kind of couldn't wait any longer to share some of my stoke.

So we'll go through the stages, do a quick overview, and mention a few of the riders that I

expect will have a shot at the GC.

And I also just wanted to touch on tomorrow's course conditions because they're unique.

Let's do the route preview first.

Okay, so where are we?

We are in South Africa, of course, which is in the southern hemisphere, which also means right now it's springtime here. And the weather is extremely

variable as we found out today and we'll be reminded of tomorrow. More on that later. The race

starts in Nizna, which is right on the coast, just inside the easternmost boundary of the

Western Cape. But it's still a full five hours,

five hours drive east of Cape Town. So Cape Town's kind of over on the west side of the

Western Cape, and we're five hours further east, but still just inside the Western Cape. So we're

kind of right in the middle of the bottom of the South African coast.

And Nyzna also happens to be where Matt Beers grew up, which is kind of a fun fact.

I know he's very excited to be here and no doubt has a little bit of extra inspiration.

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