Mark the calendar: August 13-23, 2026, the Race Around Québec rolls again - and this year the 1,000 km event has a big sibling: a 2,500 km version for anyone who thinks a thousand kilometres of Québec is merely a warm-up. Unsupported ultra racing, Canadian style: forests, lakes, the Laurentians, and long stretches where the next open shop is a genuine tactical question.
The 2026 route files aren't out yet. But the 2025 edition's 1,000 km course is, and it's the perfect dress rehearsal for the planning workflow - because in an unsupported race, the shops are your support crew, and knowing where they are is half the strategy.
The right tool for each job
A quick word on workflow, because this is the bit that makes multi-day planning painless. PitStopper is deliberately not a routing tool - building, editing and splitting routes is a solved problem, and specialist planners like Komoot or Ride with GPS do it brilliantly. So do that part there.
For a multi-day event, the move is: take the organiser's route, and in your routing tool of choice split it into one file per riding day - wherever you plan to sleep. Then bring the whole stack back to PitStopper: it loads all the day files at once as a multi-route project, gives each day its own colour, and one search pins the resupply to every day at the same time - each POI tagged to its day, with distances along that day's ride.
We cut the 2025 course into five days of ~203 km (an honest audax-pace plan, sleeping in real beds):
Then one search - water, supermarkets, convenience stores, fuel stations, hotels and campgrounds within 500 m - across all five days at once: 732 resupply points, each on its day.
The five days, by the numbers
| Day | Ends near | Water | Food shops | Fuel | Hotels | Camping |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coaticook (Eastern Townships) | 13 | 22 | 10 | 5 | 2 |
| 2 | Chambly | 17 | 32 | 21 | 9 | 3 |
| 3 | Lachute (via Montréal) | 171 | 240 | 49 | 17 | 3 |
| 4 | Mont-Tremblant | 8 | 26 | 5 | 6 | 8 |
| 5 | Finish, north of Montréal | 3 | 34 | 20 | 2 | 6 |
| Total (1,013 km) | 212 | 354 | 105 | 39 | 22 |
Each day is 203 km. The resupply is anything but evenly spread.
Day 3 is a supermarket. Day 4 is a wilderness.
The route's rhythm shows up instantly. Day 3 crosses Montréal, and the numbers go absurd: 171 water points and 240 food shops in one day - Le Plateau alone has a dépanneur (Québec's corner shop institution) every other block, plus the drinking fountains of Parc La Fontaine:
Twenty-four hours later the same race is a different sport. Day 4 climbs into the Laurentians towards Mont-Tremblant: five fuel stations and eight water points in 203 km, and long wooded gaps where the plan is whatever's in your frame bag. The one thing day 4 has in abundance: campgrounds - eight of them, cottage-country style, clustered conveniently around the Tremblant day-end. And watch day 5's water column: three public taps all day. Fill everything before you leave the Laurentians.
Racing through the night? Filter for 24/7
Actual RAQ racers won't be sleeping five nights, of course - and at 3 am the only shops that matter are the ones that never close. PitStopper reads opening hours straight from OpenStreetMap: along this route, ten places are tagged 24/7 - a chain of Petro-Canada and Esso stations, and Montréal's ever-faithful Couche-Tard dépanneurs.
The popup gives you the lot: opening hours, street address for the sat-nav, how far off the route it sits, the distance along your day to reach it - and an honesty stamp showing when OpenStreetMap last verified the place.
Send each day to the bike computer
The finish of the workflow mirrors the start: export each day's route with its POIs as a FIT course (or GPX), and every dépanneur, tap and campground becomes a course point - your bike computer or compatible watch buzzes as each one approaches. Five files in, five files out, zero surprises in between.
Roll on August. The moment the 2026 files are published - including that gloriously unreasonable 2,500 km version - we'll run the full treatment on them. Riding RAQ 2026, or know where the files will land first? Tell us.
Caveats
The 2025 route is a rehearsal - 2026's course will differ, and the 2,500 km version doubly so. OSM counts are a July 2026 snapshot within a strict 500 m corridor; a 24/7 tag is a promise made by a mapper, not a guarantee made by the shop; rural Québec dépanneurs keep their own counsel about holiday hours. And our five-day split is one plan among many - the beauty of the workflow is that your split, whatever it is, drops straight in.
Header photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash. Resupply data © OpenStreetMap contributors. 2025 route from the Race Around Québec organisers' published course file.
