Jasper’s Cory Wallace will be in Canmore this Saturday for a public question-and-answer session before he heads south to Arizona for a gruelling 24-hour race through the desert.

“It’s pretty informal,” the competitive mountain biker said of the Canmore event. “It’s just a little question-and-answer with anyone that wants to come.”

The session, with its location to be announced, will also include long-time biking legend Tinker Juarez and Leighton Poidvin, a three-time top-10 finisher in World 24 Hour Mountain Bike Championship events.

“Come have a beer and hear the stories from three of the top world athletes,” reads the event’s billing.

Shortly after that, Wallace plans to travel to Tucson, Ariz., for a desert race: the Kona 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo.

“It’s on a 16-mile loop and so I’ll do as many loops as I can in 24 hours,” he said. “My four teammates are going to do the team-of-four division and then I’ll be in the solo division.”

So how does one train for an event like that?

“We do long bike rides,” Wallace explained. “Last weekend a buddy of mine and I biked the Icefields Parkway, which took us 13 hours. We just try to do long days that train your mind to kind of quit thinking.”

Maintaining a “zoned out” state of mind is essential during extended races like this, he added, which means riders have to keep going pretty much non-stop, with few pit stops to rest.

“For the first six or eight hours we’ll go solid and then we might begin pitting for like two minutes a lap, tops,” Wallace said. “But we find anything longer than that and the body just shuts down. And then you drop out of the zone, too. Once you’re out of that zone, you’re pretty much hooped.”

Aside from “years of biking,” Wallace said another thing that helped prepare him for these high-endurance events was spending summers working as a tree planter.

“There you plant by yourself for 10 or 12 hours a day so you’ve just got to zone out,” he said.

Another component to 24-hour races is food consumption while riding. Riders pass by a “feed zone” each lap and Wallace aims to “have a little nibble on something” every 45 minutes or so.

“Physically the body can do it,” he said. “It’s all about knowing what food to eat, and then the mental game.”

The Kona 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo takes place Feb. 17-19.

The Q-and-A session in Canmore is set for Feb. 11 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. with the details of the location to be posted online this week at w24c.com. Those interested in attending can also RSVP by email to worldchampionships@twenty4sports.com with the subject line “RSVP Tinker, Cory and Leighton” to receive the details by email.

This year’s World 24 Hour Mountain Bike Championships are set to take place in Canmore Sept. 14-16.