Scenic Route

Hosts of this year’s BikeJournal Reunion recently did a pre-ride of the Epic Century route. This is the ride I’ve been training all year for, and it’s barely three weeks away.

I’ve copy-and-pasted this from the thread on BikeJournal

Ride announcement

Since Twain can’t be with us at the BikeJournal ReUnion08 on Aug. 1-3, and since he’ll be in DenverTown around the 4th of July weekend, and since the ReUnion Planning Committee still needs to ride and scout and photograph the Epic Century ride over the Peak-to-Peak Highway, we’ve decided to announce the Pre-ReUnion Epic Century (Lite).

We’ll begin the ride on Saturday, July 5th at 9 a.m. at the official ReUnion ride starting line: The school parking lot next to Highway 36 in front of the entrance to Riverview Campground.

Everyone is invited to share the day with Twain. We’ll do most of the Epic Century ride, but h3. leave off the final 15 or so mile loop to Masonville and Glade Road.

As I said, everyone is invited and this will be a true Hypoxian no-drop group ride. While the climbing will stretch us out a bit, we’ll regather again and again for “photo events”—yes, I’ll say it again: a no-drop group ride.

The route takes us south along the foothills to Highway 66, where we’ll turn west and ride to Lyons. From there, we go up St. Vrain Canyon on sublime pavement (4% to 6%) to Raymond where we join the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Riding north through some more climbs to Meeker Park, the general store, and the foot of Long’s Peak, we’ll rest and regroup for the descent into Estes Park. Again, rest and regroup, then up to Devil’s Gulch and down to Glen Haven for cinnamon rolls. Then more descending to Big Thompson Canyon, then to our starting point, for a total distance of 80-some miles with a third of that climbing, a third descending, and a third fairly flat. At least that’s my estimation. Your own estimation may vary.

Warning: If you want to ride a lot with Twain, bring your ‘A’ game. The guy’s a mountain goat.

Howard’s Ride Report

“Darnit,” I think as I watch Twain in my rear-view mirror, “when will he pass me… or drop off?” We’re climbing St. Vrain Canyon, a road with little traffic, lots of shoulder, and beautiful sublime pavement… only I’m unaware of the smoothness of the pavement, or the sound of the river as it rushes and gushes down the canyon, or of the beauty of the natural surrounding.

No, the only thoughts in my mind are: 1) Ouch, this hurts bad; 2) I’m burning up in this heat—wish I could take off my jersey without losing a pedal stroke of forward momentum; and 3) Twain is a heckuva climber—I know that from last week during the Bicycle Tour of Colorado when we climbed Lizard Head Pass together.

But today, I was giving him a great/terrible work-out, that was certain, because I have good endurance and can go forever, though not at the speeds of smaller cyclists born to climb. I’m too large to be a great climber. Twain has the climber’s physique—great calves and he weighs one large dog food bag less than me—45 lbs. less, to be exact. But then he’s also a dozen years older than I am. So something should have given one way or the other. I have a big engine capable of going on and on and on, even pointed skyward, and so I figured either he should drop off my rear wheel, because frankly, he looks like he’s working awfully hard—his head is down and I can certainly hear him breathing. Or he should be passing me and catching up to Deadhead, who is well ahead of us by now.

And yet every time I look at Twain, he’s in the exact same position on my rear wheel—about a foot back and slightly to my left. He never drops back, and certainly never overlaps the wheel. The guy’s a machine, I think. But then I can be one too.

Back to my thoughts: 1) Ouch! 2) Why is it so hot in the canyon at this altitude?; and 3) Why isn’t he passing me or dropping off?

And then it happens… he speaks up, saying, “Howard, I’m gonna need to stop for a drink and to cool down.” Did I feel victorious? NO! I felt relieved! Because I was on the verge of blowing up myself. Thank goodness, I think to myself, and we pull off the left side of the road, towards the bushes and the river, though the river is too far below the level of the road to climb down and soak body parts.

We stop. He says he’s not been so dehydrated in years. We both take long draws off our water bottles. Running low, but not out yet. I have the thought, “BalticTiger drinks more water than I do—I wonder how she’s doing?” She’s further down the road. Also: “She’s gonna be upset with me. I didn’t know St. Vrain would be this steep and relentless, and she really didn’t even want to ride today.”

Then we get back on the bikes and start climbing again. Well, I do, because Twain sees someone resting in some shady bushes down the road from us, and he hesitates, and doesn’t get started as quickly as I do. For the next quarter-mile, I see someone catching up to me, someone who’s a better climber than I. But then I am surprised to see the mystery rider tuck his front wheel in behind my own. Looking closer, it’s Twain! He caught me. But he won’t pass me!

So we begin the grind again.

At the top of St. Vrain Canyon, where it joins the Peak-to-Peak Highway, I see a rider stopped ahead and wonder out loud if it’s Deadhead waiting for us. It isn’t. But just as quickly, we see another rider coming down to greet us, and this time it IS Deadhead. We stop and chat, grateful for the break. He tells us that the convenience store is just up the road and that the climbing eases off just around the next bend. Which of course isn’t entirely correct. But it does get us around the next bend. Yeah, it does ease off a bit—very temporarily—before beginning upwards again. I recognize the hill, as I’ve ridden Peak-to-Peak twice before, and comment on it, saying, “I don’t like this hill so much.”

Twain takes up a position behind Deadhead’s rear wheel, leaving me behind. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. I can’t keep up with their pace. But I catch up every time the road flattens some. Gravity is a bear for us roadbears, but when gravity isn’t the biggest obstacle, I can fly. The road finally turns down, and I pass them.

We get to the turnoff to the convenience store… and it’s closed! But not just closed—closed for business, forever and ever! We park our bikes in front and just sit there dumbfounded. None of us has any water left, and the Meeker Park General Store is still over four miles further up the highway. Then Twain walks around behind the store and is gone for a while. Grabbing a bottle and going to see where he disappeared to, Deadhead and I find a laundromat. Maybe a door is open and there’s a laundry sink where we can get some water? Yup, the door IS open, I go in, and don’t see Twain or a sink. In the back of the laundromat I hear Twain, in a bathroom, drinking all the water! We each take turns filling and drinking, filling and drinking. We’re feral animals now, guzzling, not caring that we’re making a mess on the floor around the sink. There’s water!

Refilling my bottle one more time, we walk back to our bikes in front of the no-longer-convenient convenience store, and decide to ride back up to a Scenic Outlook and wait for the others—“up” being the operative term.

When we get there, there is practically no shade. Only asphalt. And an informational sign telling about the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Although it doesn’t say so, I tell Twain and Deadhead that the P2P Highway was originally intended to be a mountain highway connecting Pike’s Peak to Long’s Peak, but that the state only go as far as Long’s Peak down to Black Hawk/Central City before running out of money. So technically, it’s the Peak-to-I70 Highway. We drink more of our water and eat some bicycle food.

BooBee rolls in, followed by Popeye. We ask them if they’ve seen BalticTiger and BikePrincess. They haven’t. So we wait some more and I continue drinking from my water bottle. After about 15 minutes, Deadhead and I ask Twain to lead the others down to the laundromat while we climb back up and over the hill in search of our wives.

Off we go, and our legs aren’t happy with us. A mile down the road, we see a rider coming and Deadhead says he’s going to ask him if he’s seen our wives. He says he has, about 45 minutes ago, and that they were asking for a cell phone to call us and tell us they were turning around. Bad news, as both our cell phones are out of battery AND out of service range. We decide to ride to the top of the next roller, but we still see nothing. We know if we now go downhill in search of our wives, we’ll have to climb back up the hill. But I say, “let’s ride down to that white sign up there, and if we don’t see anything, we’ll turn around then.” Which we do.

And we see them!

Walking their bikes…

We hustle down to them, and they don’t look well. The first words out of BalticTiger’s mouth are, “Do you have any water?!” And looking down… I don’t! Not a drop. Oh. My. God. I screwed up bad. Here’s my wife in obvious distress, and I didn’t bring her any water. I felt terrible and couldn’t speak. Deadhead still had about a third of a bottle left though, so they both got something to drink.

Then they talk and decide what to do. I’m no help because I’m reeling in shame at my thoughtlessness. But Deadhead is clearheaded enough to advise them to just turn around and descend for 14 miles straight back to Lyons. BalticTiger doesn’t need convincing and turns her bike around. We say our goodbyes, and away we all go.

As we’re riding back up to the laundromat, Deadhead tells me that their decision was the best one. I continue on silently. Perhaps he thought I disapproved and wanted them to continue on with us, but really I was still feeling like I’d let BalticTiger down. I didn’t want to talk. Thanks, Deadhead, for your clearheadedness in a difficult situation.

Finishing the ride, we find BalticTiger and BikePrincess at the cars where we started the ride that morning. They look much better and tell us that they’ve been waiting for us for 45 minutes. BalticTiger says that when she rolled into Lyons at the bottom of St. Vrain Canyon, she saw a park with an old-fashioned hand water pump and rode through grass and gravel to get at it. She said she must have drank four of five bottles of water.

Also that evening, she said she lost seven pounds. Dehydration, all right.

Lesson Learned

We’ll have four SAG wagons patrolling the routes for ReUnion08, and we decided that one or two of those vehicles will be stationed at points along the Epic Century route as impromptu Aid Stations with water, shade, encouragement, and A.C. ... just in case August 2nd is another hot day like yesterday.

Baltic Tiger’s (Howard’s wife’s) Ride Report

I don’t believe I’ve ever not completed a ride before. Truthfully, I was starting to get worried as I rode, being out of water/gatorade, with my bike computer reading 108 degrees in the sunlight. But I kept riding up the canyon because I thought there would be water at the next porta-pottie or pullout. But there never was.

And then BikePrincess and I thought—we’ll just go and ask somebody in one of these cabins for water. But by the time we discussed that idea, we were in the national forest part of the canyon and the houses were gone.

Then it was, “well, it’s 14 miles down, but only 4 or so miles to the convenience store.”Yeah, but we were going 4 mph by this time and I was having to stop and lie down every mile or so, wherever I could find shade—I was going to have to put up with an hour more of this?

I could hardly speak at this point, though I do remember apologizing over and over to BikePrincess. She’d also run out of water by then but was still chugging away and occasionally saying things like, “Well, at least it’s beautiful!” or “There’s a bit of cloud,” or “I’m sure the boys will come down and check on us pretty soon,” and “It’ll be great to get to the convenience store at the top,” and variations on that theme.

Dehydration and heat issues are not to be toyed with. We should have probably turned around sooner, but by the time we started to seriously consider it, we knew we were getting fuzzy and uncoordinated and that we wouldn’t be as agile and sharp to handle the descent. But the few swallows from Deadhead’s bottle at the top of the canyon revived us and we turned back the way we’d come. The best decision ever!

We screamed down this wonderful, wonderful canyon we’d ascended, with very little traffic, on Valygryl’s “sublime pavement,” with the St. Vrain river rushing in white sprays through rocks below us, and we made it to Lyons in less than 20 minutes, bombed across the grass to the park, and drank our fill of water. Awesome! Then we turned the ride into our own ride, and headed back east over Highway 66, through a storm near Rabbit Mountain, then north along the foothills (following the Buffalo Classic’s route) to BikePrincess’s beloved “foothills loop,” then down highway 34 along the river and over to the Big Thompson school.

We hadn’t not completed the ride. We’d created our own ride. But I learned an important lesson—I need to bring my two bottles for summer rides and also bring my camel back, no matter what (I think I was a bit spoiled by the BTC’s great aid stations). And always have a BikePrincess with you for lip balm, snacks, and the odd comment of rueful encouragement!

If you’re lucky enough to do this beautiful ride at RU08, you’ll have the aid support I didn’t have, and you’ll truly experience the ride of a lifetime.

My comments

Yow! I ride that even some of the locals couldn’t finish. I feel a bit more intimidated than I did before, but I’m relieved that really strong riders are okay with turning back. If I have to I won’t feel like a failure. And I’m glad they’re adding some SAG to this ride. I think I’ll need it.

Here’s a very dramatic video of Deadhead, Tenbrooks, and Howard flying down Big Thompson Canyon:

Oh yeah. That’s why I wanted to do this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 7:24 pm UTC and is filed under Bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.