2016 Quasi-Epic Colorado Mountain Ride

Introduction

If you’re looking for a report about an epic Colorado mountain ride (like this one, this one, or this one), think again:  the only thing epic about my recent ride was how badly my friend Peter and I got our asses kicked.  Just now I was recounting to my wife the stats of our 2014 effort—146 miles with over 11,000 feet of climbing, including a 12,400-foot pass—and comparing it to the paltry stats we piled up this time (less than half the distance, with a 25% lower average speed).  “What’s going on?” my wife asked.  “Menopause?”

If you hate me, and/or enjoy reality TV and/or other glaring depictions of human frailty and misery, this may be the ride report you’ve been waiting for.

Executive summary

“We got what we deserved.”

Short version

After not training properly in like a year, Pete and I went into this ride woefully unprepared, and I suffered terribly on a series of brutally steep dirt climbs.  We decided to change the route due to rainstorms, but then reversed this decision in an act of hubris.  I completely ran out of steam by the end of the longest climb, just in time for a 90-minute drenching downpour that washed away the rest of my resolve, along with my dignity, my circulation, and my humanity.  Unable and unwilling to recover from the severe chill, we cut the ride short and descended home with our tails between our legs.

Long version

I should have prepared for this ride by doing lots of long, hard road rides, with gobs of climbing, in the company of the superior athletes on my bike club.  Instead, I spent most of the last year doing short, easy rides with my young daughter while (unadvisedly) continuing to eat like a real athlete.  (At least, this is my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)

My friend Peter, a former professional road racer, prepared in pretty much the same way—he’s been riding with his son, who’s even younger than my daughter.  One day these kids will kick our butts, but for now they’re just giving us an excuse to loaf our way through rides.  (This is well worth it, of course, because these kids improve every time they ride and are achieving the gradual apotheosis from regular human to elite athlete, as opposed to their wretched fathers who are trying, mostly in vain, just to slow the ravages of age.)

In an act of craven capitulation, Pete and I set out to ride a mere 100 miles, albeit with more than 10,000 feet of climbing.  We got a late start because I’d spent the previous day in the car, returning from a road trip to Telluride, and got to bed after midnight. 

Breakfast was cheese omelet, toast, braised tomatoes, toast, cruelty-free local sausages, and toast.  (I inherit a lot of my kids’ toast.  See how this blaming thing works?)

Here is the “before” shot.  That’s my brother Max with us, who came for breakfast but wisely opted out of the ride.

My  family was staying at a lodge at the base of Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder.  This meant only half a mile of warm-up before the climbing began.  Due mainly to poor fitness but also to the altitude, right away I was huffing and puffing like the Little Train That Could.  I was able to smile for this early photo because of muscle memory in my face.

Note that all that white on my face isn’t salt from dried sweat—it wasn’t that hot out.  Nor is that white beard stubble—I’m not (quite) that old.  It’s this new-fangled sunscreen that’s as viscous as toothpaste.  My family opted not to tell me I hadn’t rubbed it in well enough, because (just like you) they prefer to laugh at me behind my back.

Instead of turning and heading over to the Flagstaff “summit” (i.e., the place where the flag pole is), we went straight, to tackle the climb that locals call “Superflag.”  This is always a brutal one, but especially so this time around.  I had to weave a lot even though I was using shamefully low gearing (27-tooth rear cog plus a compact crank).  At the summit my hands were shaking too badly to snap a photo; fortunately a couple of tourists helped us out.  The treeless hump in the background left of me is Sugarloaf Mountain (just under 9,000 feet elevation) and the pale peak behind that (with the snow) is Mount Audubon (just over 13,000 feet).

We  did a nice dirt descent to Gross Reservoir. 

From here we proceeded south and west, and I lost track of geography somewhat because Peter—who is a fricking madman—had designed a route over a number of grotesquely steep dirt climbs that essentially shut down my normal brain function.  There was a lot of washboard—that is, stretches of dirt warped like corrugated steel by car tires braking or accelerating too hard—which is almost impossible to ride on; it feels like riding over the rumble strip on the edge of a highway.  The steepest sections (~16%) didn’t offer enough traction for me to ride out of the saddle, nor to take photos.  Here’s a shallower section where I could do both (though not simultaneously—duh!). 

This shit went on and on, as if designed to completely wear me down in every way.  Meanwhile, the sky darkened and threatened the kind of downpour that, though not forecast on this day, is always a possibility in these parts.

Our original route had us riding the Peak to Peak Highway north for many dozens of miles, taking us well north of Boulder over a number of serious climbs.  But we could see a big storm in that direction and really didn’t feel like getting caught out.  So we rerouted, figuring we’d tool around near Idaho Springs and Golden.  We started yet another dirt climb, toward Ely Hill, and had made some good (but hard-fought) progress before seeing the skies clearing in the distance over the Peak to Peak.  Now we had to decide if the detour was really necessary.

“Maybe it’s clearing up over there,” Pete said.  “We could play it safe and stay south, or go back and do the original ride.”  We hemmed and hawed before he said, “The ▒▒▒▒▒ thing to do would be to stay south, but the manly thing would be to head north.”  (I’ve omitted a word there because I’m not sure Pete would want to go on record having used it.)

Well, that pretty much settled it.  As I’ve explained before, it’s hard to resist choosing the harder route because it’s so easy to just point your bike in that direction and suffer the consequences later.  And so that’s what we did.  “If we get rained on, we’ll be getting what we deserve,” Pete declared.

I thought I knew right away what he meant—that we’d pay the price for the last year of slacking off and letting ourselves get so out of shape.  But he went on to tell a bike race tale that put his comment in a more specific context.  “It was the Tour of Somerville, a big box-shaped criterium where the last corner is more like a curve so you can sprint through it if you’re at the front, but it’s really dangerous if you’re mid-pack.  Kent Bostick and I led out Jamie Carney, who won.  There were all these guys sprinting for like 50th place, which caused a huge crash.  I was ahead of it, but Kent—who’d started the lead-out—was behind it, and he said to us later, ‘When I went by those [crashing] guys, I yelled, ‘You’re getting what you deserve!’”

We hit a steep dirt descent with lots of ruts, bumps, and more washboard, and it was a bit muddy from a recent rain.  Soon enough I got a rear flat.  I didn’t think I’d hit anything hard enough to get a pinch-flat, but when I practically burned myself on my rim—which was red-hot from all the braking—I wondered if my tube had melted.  (Pete was riding tubeless.)  I got that fixed, and then two minutes later got a front flat.  In case my melting-tube theory was correct, I tried to brake a lot less after that, which was a little hairy … I was glad when the descent was over.

We headed through Blackhawk, where legend has it a woman once married her motorcycle, toward Central City, a gambling mecca.  Traffic kind of sucked here, plus we had a pretty serious headwind and the longest single climb of the ride, from Central City to where Highway 119 hits Highway 46 (look at the map at the end of this post).  The average grade is only 4% and it’s only 5 miles, so it’s pretty sad how badly it kicked my ass.

Thunder rumbled all around us.  Actually, this had been happening for most of the day.  I really love thunder, but my excitement is greater when I have a house to retreat to.  On this day I was trying to forget it each time.  I wanted to ignore what it might obviously portend.

God, the climbing went on and on.  I can’t remember where all the worst bits were but I was just grinding myself down, my speed dropping along with my morale, my legs getting progressively more sluggish like I was a wind-up toy reaching the end of its spring.  I stood on the pedals, I sat back down, I kept trying to shift only to find I was already in my lowest gear … it was like a nightmare, only boring.  Pete kept accidentally dropping me (having only a 25-tooth cog to my 27).  I have no more action photos of this ride because I was no longer capable of, nor interested in, snapping photos.

I’d known full well this ride would suck—no, actually, that the ride would be fine but I would suck—but that didn’t make the reality any easier to take.  Of course this was a comeuppance for Pete and me, attempting an epic ride without actually training for it, but I’d somehow hoped muscle memory and finesse would carry the day.  Instead we got Mother Nature bitch-slapping us continuously as a warning not to trifle with her.  We were getting what we deserved.

My psyche began trending toward despondence.  I hadn’t felt this awful in the bike in almost two years.  I had no idea how many miles still lay ahead, or how many passes, or how long Pete’s patience with my especial feebleness would last.  I wondered:  could I just stop?  Obviously that wouldn’t help anything; resting just erodes the morale when it’s time to pedal again.  And my legs weren’t completely spent—the problem was psychological in that I just didn’t want to do this anymore.  Could I just pull over and say screw it?  Go on strike?  “Occupy Road Shoulder”?  The cycling equivalent of a hunger strike?  No, of course not.  How would I get home?  How would I tolerate Pete giving me shit over this for the rest of my life?  And how would I live with myself?  Cripes, we’d only gone like 45 miles!  This was shaping up to be, possibly, the most pathetic bike ride of my life.

I looked down at my legs.  Amazingly, they just kept pedaling, as though my crankset was attached to some external power source and was turning the legs rather than the other way around.  Sheer inertia was keeping them going.  My legs were just stupidly pumping away because they simply didn’t know what else to do.  And my brain?  Other than registering misery, it wasn’t doing anything.  It wasn’t in charge.  From the legs up I was just a wretched human payload.  And my arms?  They could barely hold me up.  My back was also trashed, probably from all the low-cadence in-the-saddle grinding I’d been doing on the dirt climbs.  I was pretty much screwed from head to toe.

The road, though straight, disappeared up ahead:  could be a summit, but possibly just a fake one.  I yelled up to Pete, “I’m stopping up here whether it’s the top or not.”  It ended up being the top—for now.  I even had an excuse to stop:  it was raining.  Had I noticed this already?  I can’t remember.  I put on my jacket, knowing it would be soaked through and useless within minutes, but appreciating the vague sense of doing something useful.  We started to descend, at long last.

Mother Nature wasn’t done with us, though.  The rain picked up until it was just hammering us.  My bike computer said it was 45 degrees now, but it felt a lot colder.  Maybe the raindrops were colder than that.  In fact, they felt like hail.  Each drop striking my body felt like a needle stabbing me, and my entire epidermis felt like your mouth does after a bite of too-spicy food.

Oddly, throughout this the whole experience I felt something like relief.  After worrying about being rained on for so long, I didn’t have to worry anymore—it was happening.  And at least the climbing was over for now.  I just sat on my bike, coasting, letting the rain wash over me.  And I felt this strange sense of airy spiritual lightness, deriving perhaps from the knowledge that a) things couldn’t get much worse, and yet b) this wouldn’t go on forever, and moreover c) at some point, in the next several hours, after a hot shower, I would return to a life that itself is not miserable.  This ride was not a microcosm of my overall experience in this world; for all its crushing reality this experience was an anomaly, a self-inflicted punishment for an existence that has become all too comfortable.  I am not, I reflected, a miserable person:  I’m just having a miserable time.  (And actually, looking back, it wasn’t pure misery ... it was kind of fun in a way.  I seem to have a fondness for this kind of suffering, and the memory of this ride will surely get sweeter over time.)

My hands became useless flippers due to the cold.  More accurately they were like lobster claws; I could work the brakes, and even shift the gears here and there if I really worked at it.  As we descended toward Nederland, I started to worry about another flat tire, because the road was flooding and all kinds of gravel and little stones were washing into the road.  The descent wasn’t technical so we took it pretty fast, perhaps instinctively saving some brake pad for later.

We got to the same convenience store in Nederland we always stop at.  I was hoping it’d be warm in there, but either the cashier has no control over the thermostat, or was keeping the AC jacked up to serve the dry and better insulated customers.  We filled large foam cups with hot cocoa and warmed our hands on them.  I grabbed a Hostess fruit pie (420 calories).  I gazed dreamily at the hot dog case:  not at the oily, endlessly rotating dogs but at the bun warmer below, wondering if Pete and I could pool our cash and buy the whole stock of buns, just to press them against our frigid, aching limbs.

It took a long time to pay because our hands wouldn’t work.  My arms were almost too weak to reach my jersey pockets.  Pete was just standing there shaking from head to toe … I’ve never seen him so cold.  My teeth were chattering so hard I couldn’t stop them—my jaw wouldn’t respond.  We looked at the clock:  quarter to five.  “If we freakin’ hammer down Boulder Canyon—I mean, hammer—we could be done by 5:30,” Pete said.  I stared at him.  He must be insane, I thought.  Pedaling a bicycle at all—in fact, doing anything at all—seemed almost impossible … how could I possibly hammer?

Amazingly, though the sun never came out, the rain had stopped when we stepped back outside, and as we cranked down Boulder Canyon in too low a gear—so as to spin the highest cadence we could—we started to warm up.  Eventually the blood in our legs got to circulating properly, and we actually did find ourselves hammering somewhat.  At about 5:40 p.m., our painful, humiliating ordeal finally came to an end. 

Sure, I’m managing to fake a smile in the above photo, but look at how tired and baggy and red my eyes are (red from the grit that had been sprayed into my contact lenses since the rain had made sunglasses impossible): 

And though Pete is mugging for the camera, look at his eyes … you can see the suffering there.  It cannot be hidden.
 

My  hot shower wasn’t as delightful as I’d hoped, because my skin just felt so thoroughly messed with and irritated, nothing could return it to normal.  Still, it was good to rinse off all that road grime:

Speaking of grime, our bikes’ drivetrains took a beating.  Check it out:  absolutely nothing left on this chain:

And Pete’s brake pads were worn to the point of near-uselessness:

Dinner #1 was a whole box of pasta with an indifferent marinara sauce from a jar.  This had no effect whatsoever on our appetites.  My stomach no more registered the three plates than had I eaten a single cracker. 

Then we limped down to the dining hall and had a beer (Odell IPA, from nearby Fort Collins), which hit the spot, along with a couple big glasses of water the bartender must have sensed we needed.

While my wife conjured up Dinner #2, I sat in bed, doing nothing other than feeling stunned by the whole ordeal.  My brother Max, who had come for dinner, looked at me aghast:  “You really don’t look so good.”  He turned to my daughter Alexa and said, “Look at him!  Look at his eyes!”  Alexa, not missing a beat, said, “Yes, he’s got that dead look in his eyes, ‘cause he’s seen so many horrors that he’s sort of immune to them.”

Dinner #2 was grass-fed beef marinara (without pasta—Pete and I had eaten it all), a cobbled-together tartiflette, and—shoot, what was the third thing?  I don’t recall, but I well remember the ice cream cone Max made.  He stuffed two flavors—dulche de leche and chocolate-chocolate-chip—in alternating layers all the way down the cone, then over the top.

I asked my wife and kids if they’d had a good day.  “Yeah, we got our toenails done!” they replied.

Stats and maps

Unfortunately, Pete is on Strava so I can’t make excuses about my bike computer getting reset, and am honor-bound to share the dismal stats of our Ride of Shame: 

• 74.4 miles
• 7:34:58 elapsed time (could we have spent an hour in that convenience store??)
• 6:02:31 ride time
• 12.3 mph average speed (!)
• 9,918 feet cumulative elevation gain

Pretty sad, eh?  But I’ll tell you what:  age and sloth may have deprived us of speed, power, endurance, and verve, but they haven’t robbed us of character.  I think we might have actually shored that up a bit with this ride.  And one thing is for certain:  we got what we deserved.

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2014 Epic Colorado Mountain Ride - Part 2

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

This post is a sequel.  If you start reading from here, chances are you’ll figure it out, like with those endless superhero movie franchises.  But if you want to understand why my friend Pete and I did this super-long bike ride in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, click here for part one.

Food

Here’s a little-known truth:  real bike racers—I mean the Euro pros—actually starve themselves.  As I learned from a tell-all memoir, one coach even recommended that his riders make a practice of doing a six-hour training ride, drinking a couple liters of carbonated water, and then trying to sleep through dinner.  I wish these riders and coaches hadn’t figured out that the human body is capable of normal power output even when half-starved, because the modern dietary strategy has made all the pro racers look like stick figures or extraterrestrials.

For us amateurs, the old rules still apply:  ride big, eat big.  I don’t mess around when it comes to fueling up for a big ride, and I enjoy the privilege of unconstrained gorging.  So on the evening before the second leg of our epic Colorado mountain ride, Pete and I went to a little family-owned Italian joint in Fraser.  The owner said, “Sit anywhere you want, make yourselves comfortable.  I got a real good-looking waitress I’ll send over … if she ever wakes up.”  Sure enough, we looked over to see the waitress in the middle of a giant yawn.  (I’m pretty sure this was the owner’s daughter.)

We pored over the menus and figured out our strategy.  “This might cause a raised eyebrow,” I told the waitress, “but in addition to the lasagne, I’d like to order an extra-large supreme pizza.  I’m on a special diet.”  She looked surprised, and Pete said, “Hey, didn’t he warn you about the raised eyebrow?” 

Our soup and salad arrived, and the bread that came with the soup, and a basket of rolls.  Then the pizza.  Then the entrees.  You know, the term “18-inch” is actually just an approximation.  This pizza seemed as big round as a bike wheel.  And it was good, other than having canned mushrooms on it (?!).  We did some serious damage to this spread, polishing off all of our entrees and sides and all but two slices of the ‘za.  The waitress came by to check on us, saw this, and said, “Holy shit!”

Breakfast the next morning, at about 5:30 a.m., was a cup of strong coffee and (duh!) the leftover pizza.

Freezing in Fraser

I forgot to mention, we took a day off between the two legs of this ride, and during that day it rained on and off the whole time—except when we were walking to breakfast and doing a one-hour spin-the-legs ride.  Now, on day three, the rain still seemed at bay, and it’s a good thing, because it was unseasonably cold:  45 degrees.  And it got colder as we went.  As we approached Fraser, which is like a big basin, I noted all the fog collecting there.  Pete casually mentioned (and I’ve now ascertained) that because of this chronic fog, Fraser frequently boasts the coldest temperatures in the contiguous U.S.

Down, down, down the temperature plunged, to a low of 36 degrees.  In Boulder we would always qualify a remarkable temperature with “But it’s a dry [heat/cold]!” but that didn’t apply here.  Oh, and I’m a Californian, accustomed to perfect weather, so this was especially harsh for me.  We started to gradually climb out of the basin, and the slight increase in temperature caused moisture to condense all over our gear:  my bike computer, my helmet (so dew dripped down in front of my face), and my bike.

Pete said, “Hey, this is weird, my legs aren’t cold anymore!”  I noticed the same thing.  The explanation?  Condensation had formed on our leg hairs.  It seemed like every hair had its own big droplet.  Together, they seemed to form a complete barrier to the cold, insulating our legs!  So if you’re looking for an excuse not to bother shaving (other than “my wife says my leg hair is the only masculine thing about me”), there you have it.

The major climb

The big event of the day?  Climbing over Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous auto highway (in other words, the highest pass) in North America.  It’s about a twenty mile climb, to over 12,000 feet.  It’s not very hard, unless oxygen is important to you.  The scenery is pretty impressive.  There are also some  serious drop-offs, which never really bothered me, but it sure scared some Dutch relatives of mine who drove over Trail Ridge with me and my family back in the ‘90s.  The first time I ever rode this pass was the summer I turned 14; you can read about my trials (thunderstorm, hunger knock, being a stupid kid) here.  But on this day, the weather was fine, we paced ourselves, and other than the climb being really fricking long it didn’t give us too much trouble.  Here’s Pete indicating his okay-ness.

And here we are at almost the top, in front of the giant visitor’s center, which is like a national embassy or something.  You can see for miles and miles from their observation deck.  Well, we could.  See that little trail winding along in the background?  That’s Fall River Road.  You should mountain bike there sometime, or maybe I should.  Somebody should.

They sell everything at that visitor’s center.  Many years ago I bought my daughters these glorious stuffed bears there.  Lindsay named hers “Lindsay Bear,” and it was her favorite stuffy until it was stolen—yes, actually stolen—by some friends whose dog had also fallen in love with it.  So I’d warned Pete that if I could find a replacement bear, he’d have to carry it for me for the rest of the ride.  Fortunately for him, the only bears they have now are these creepily smiling mother/offspring bears that are sewn together, which is just weird.  Are you supposed to separate them, like Siamese twins, or just have this weird pair stuck in an infinite cuddle?

A guy asked us how far we’d be riding that day.  “Around 150 miles,” Pete told him, to which the guy replied, “Holy shit!”  How about that … our second “holy shit” in as many days!

We drank some cocoa, climbed back on our bikes, and rode to the actual summit.  I was hoping for a big elevation sign for a photo-op, but the only one I saw was a small placard attached to a restroom.  So you’ll have to settle for some more pictures of gorgeous scenery. 

I was in pretty good spirits as we began the descent down the eastern side, but I wasn’t completely stoked.  The problem was this:  though we’d ridden for four hours and gone around sixty miles, we’d only climbed like 4,000 feet, and we had about 100 miles and 12,000 more feet of climbing still to come.  It’s hard to enjoy an emotional high when you’ve only just scratched the surface of the suffering yet to come.  Who came up with this crazy route, anyway?  Oh, yeah.  Pete.  I couldn’t exactly complain to him though.  He’d just mock me.

Later

We had a sweet descent.  It seemed like I could feel the reduced wind resistance of the thin air.  At that altitude you can coast along at 40 mph down a 4% grade.  The air got progressively hotter and we had to pull over and shed our jackets.  We hit the outskirts of Estes Park and took a hard right (though it was tempting to go straight and descend for another ten miles.)  We bought a gallon of water at a bait shop.  (Was there even a lake?  Must have been.  It seemed like a bait shop, anyway.)

A narrow twisty steep road led us to the Peak to Peak highway, heading toward Allenspark.  Now it was all up and down over the Peak to Peak for the next several hours.  The descents were lovely but over way too soon, and the climbs went on and on.  It was a lot like how the weekend goes by in a flash and then you’re back to slogging away.  Here’s Pete possibly looking tired.  Actually, I’m sure he’s just looking at his drive train or something.

We decided to shorten the ride from the original 170-mile loop, which would have taken us all the way to the end of the Peak to Peak highway.  There was a closer cutoff—taking Coal Creek Canyon instead of Golden Gate Canyon—that would shave off about 20 miles and around 4,000 vertical feet.  The rationale for this, in no particular order, were that a) Pete forgot to train this year, and b) I’m from California.  If you’re in your mid-40s and have recently completed a 170-mile ride with 16,000 feet of climbing, feel free to give me a hard time about this capitulation.

It had been really hot coming out of Estes Park, but other than that we enjoyed perfect weather.  All day we were looking out at thunderheads but they always seemed to be over some other vista—either the place we’d just been, or the place we were headed.  It was like somebody took Murphy’s Law and stood it on its head.

We climbed to Ward, kept straight, and descended to Nederland.  Why is it called Nederland when its elevation is over 8,000 feet?  It’s because miners of nearby Caribou Hill, which is at over 10,000 feet, used to bring their ore down to this place for milling, and called it “the Netherlands,” and when the town was incorporated in 1874 they chose the name Nederland.

We stopped at a convenience store for some calories—the same convenience store we’d gone to during our last epic ride, three years ago.  I well remembered getting a Hostess fruit pie last time, but Hostess has gone under, so all they had this time were Lil’ Debbies brand fruit pies.  These ended up being even better because they were cheaper:  $1.29 for 480 calories, putting to shame every energy bar in existence. 

It’s funny:  some people I know like to go on high-end vacations to fancy resorts where they eat Kobe beef and drink expensive wine, and maybe get luxurious spa treatments, but I don’t get that much pleasure from such things.  All the fuss slightly embarrasses me.  I’d rather tackle a bike ride that’s so difficult that just sitting on a bench feels like an extreme luxury, and a cheap fruit pie tastes exquisite.  If the ride is long enough, my lukewarm energy drink starts to taste like a magic elixir, and a cold glass of water at the end is a small miracle.

Below, you can compare photos from the recent ride and the 2011 one.  Do we look older?  Frailer?  I think the main difference is that my crow’s feet are more pronounced and my eyes are even smaller, collapsing into my face.  Three years from now my eyes will just be slits, like on a drive-by car.  The other noteworthy thing is that this time my lips are purple, as sometimes happens when I’m oxygen-deprived..

We rode south awhile longer, then departed the Peak to Peak highway for good, hooking a left and climbing Coal Creek Canyon.  I guess I was pretty spent at the top because my hands were shaky and I couldn’t manage to take a useable narcie with Pete.  (What?  You’ve never heard of a narcie?  It’s the more precise word for “selfie.”)  I kept accidentally cropping one or another head, and couldn’t get enough of the background in there.  So here’s a non-narcissistic photo of the gorgeous backdrop (and yes, more thunderheads).  They don’t call it Wondervu for nothing.

At this point in the ride we had about twenty miles to go, virtually all of it downhill.  Our average speed so far was 16.1 mph and the question was, how much could we increase that?  The other question was, could we actually manage to avoid the rain?  We could see it coming down hard out on the horizon, over Denver. 

The descent was a blast, needless to say, and when we turned south on Highway 93 for the last few miles of the ride, we satisfied our schadenfreude centers by passing hundreds of cars trapped in rush hour traffic.  We got to Pete’s house in Golden and could see it had rained there, and looked like it would rain again.

It did rain again, very hard, like ten minutes after we arrived.  If you think we had amazing luck, well, yeah, we did.  But the last time we’d tried to do an epic ride, in spring of 2012, there was so much snow all the passes were closed.  So to me this felt like Mother Nature righting a wrong.

Upslope

Upslope?  What?  You mean we had to ride up another hill?  No, it’s this beer:

See how it says “limited release”?  This isn’t just the BS you sometimes see, like my old “Limited Edition” Bruce Jenner Signature Edition AMF Roadmaster bicycle, where they “only” made 150,000 of them.  This Belgian-style beer really was available for just a short period last spring, and Pete liked it so much he set aside a six-pack for four months so we could have it after this ride.  Well, actually, his will power flagged a bit over the months and he only managed to hang on to three of them, but that ended up being plenty.  We didn’t even get in a fistfight over the third beer, which we split.

Dinners

My first dinner was pasta with chicken in a Madeira sauce, at Pete’s.  Immediately following this I headed over to my brother Max’s house and we had pasta with marinara sauce and fried fish.  Nobody thought anything of this; Pete’s wife knew that the meal she served was just a warm-up.  Maybe that’s why I like this sport so much.

Stats and maps

Several of my biking pals have talked about doing an intervention and forcing me to join Strava.  One guy even mentioned sneaking a GPS device on my bike so they could gather up some big data, figuring that once I saw all the pretty graphs, maps, and reports, I’d finally cave in.  Well, until that happens you’ll have to make do with some bullet points and snapshots of Pete’s Strava pages.  (And this blog, of course.) 

• 146.1 miles
• 8:41:14 ride time
• 16.8 mph average speed
• 71 rpm average cadence
• 11,161 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 37.2 miles total climbing
• 13,747 feet cumulative elevation drop
• 61.7 miles total descending

Epic Colorado Ride

Introduction

Whenever I visit my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, I do an epic ride with my friend Peter. He plans out a suitably difficult route and I follow along, suffering. Last month I visited, and we rode, and I’ve only now recovered sufficiently to write about it.

Here is the view of the Flatirons visible from most parts of Boulder:

Who is Peter?

Peter is a lot like me, only better. I met him at a bike race back in 1985 when we got in a breakaway together. At the finish he outsprinted me by such a huge margin it appeared he’d actually soloed to victory. Ever since that day, he’s been stronger than I every time we’ve ridden, with one notable exception: the Colorado State Road Championship road race in 1987. Peter, the reigning state champion, got hooked by another rider and crashed with 300 meters to go. As I approached the finish, I looked back to see him bearing down on me. I just nipped him at the line. Afterward I discovered that the crash had bent his front brake bolt, mashing one of the pads into his rim. You couldn’t even turn the wheel by hand.

That was the one time I got the better of Peter. It’s been Bambi vs. Godzilla ever since.

Preparation

How does one prepare for a brutal ride like this? Well, if you’re lucky you have access to a really nice stationary bike like this one:

That bike actually has some tangible benefits over what you see at the gym. It’s fully adjustable, for one thing. And I’ll be that flywheel really helps smooth out your pedal stroke. Plus, the thing weighs like a gazillion pounds so you could do curls with it, at least if you’re as strong as my brother Max (shown here).

But actually, instead of preparing for this ride, I prepared with it, for the upcoming Everest Challenge. Some say training at altitude is a great idea; others say you shouldn’t train at altitude but rather just hang around there. Well, I’ve done both. I’ve even drunk beer and eaten big pasta at altitude. I’m covering all my bases.

Finding a bike

My Boulder trip was short so it wasn’t worth spending $100 each way to bring my bike. (For details on the travesty of bike fees on airlines, see Appendix A below.) I tried to line up a loaner bike, but largely in vain. A friend of a friend—a guy I’d never met—was nice enough to loan me a cool old Cilo, and I did ride it a fair bit during my trip, but it was too small to do an epic ride on. (The guy even gave me the go-ahead to move the saddle all around, but the seat binder bolt looked like it had rusted back in the Reagan years and might snap if I so much as looked at it wrong.)

It was tempting to do the epic ride on my brother’s rickshaw-wheeled cruiser, Big Red:

You might assume that Big Red is a one-speed, but it’s not. As detailed here, it’s got a 7-speed internal gearing système. But the gears aren’t really low enough and the bike is too valuable, and too cool, to risk on a guy like me.

So I figured I’d just do a “Performance Road Rental”—i.e., rent a $6,000 full Dura-Ace Serotta from University Bikes, the über-cool bike shop in Boulder. I went there the evening before the ride, with my shoes, tape measure, and pedals, to make sure I got the fit just right. Alas, some portly stockbroker beat me to the Serotta by a matter of hours, just so he could have a better bike for his little 30-mile muffin ride. (Okay, for all I know he was a total badass doing an ever harder ride than I.) I had to settle for a “standard road rental,” which meant a cheap Cannondale, with mismatched wheels, a triple crankset, and a front reflector.

For me to use such a bike on the epic ride seemed like a punishment of some kind. Front reflectors are for people who ride on the wrong side of the road at night without a light, and elsewhere these pages I’ve made clear my feelings about triple cranksets. As for Cannondales, they’re perfectly fine bikes, but as detailed in Appendix B below, I’ve just never liked them much.

The bike did fit well, thanks largely to the nice folks at uBikes who swapped out the stem for me. But man, it was amazingly heavy. I think it’s the heaviest road bike I’ve ridden since my 1981 Miyata 310. I didn’t realize anybody still made such a heavy road bike. I didn’t even think the current state of the art was capable of producing such a heavy bike. Maybe they fill the frame up with buckshot, to make sure the low-end bikes don’t cut into sales of the pricier ones.

The other issue was the saddle, which was one of these giant sofa-like things with the big ravine down the middle. How much padding could a guy need? There’s room in that foam for Magic Fingers. I call this the “prostate intimidation” saddle, because it’s designed to capitalize on vague fears men have about their prostates, much in the way that, back in the ‘70s, that one laundry detergent fear-mongered about the nonexistent bane of “ring around the collar,” or that one shampoo made dandruff seem like a love-life-threatening global epidemic. On principal alone I couldn’t ride the prostate-friendly saddle, so I borrowed Max’s tiny, rock-hard saddle, a Selle Italia SLR or some such. There’s probably a whole range of SLRs, and this is the smallest, lightest, and hardest (the “SLR Nano,” perhaps). It’s also pretty old, and by far the hardest saddle I’ve ever sat on, including those all-plastic BMX saddles. It was like sitting on a 2x4.

Epic beginning

Here is the requisite “before” photo. You can tell I’m a bit worried about the ride. Pete, meanwhile, looks like he’s pre-savoring his schadenfreude.

Peter had planned out a difficult route indeed. After just a couple miles of warm-up we went straight uphill, up Flagstaff, a road used many times as the prologue time trial for the Red Zinger and Coors Classic, which finished about halfway up the main climb near the Flagstaff House restaurant (where I had my wedding reception back in ’94). Here, you can see it’s still pretty early in the morning:

At the end of the main climb we took a trip up Summit Road to where there’s a little amphitheater, and then we went back to the main road and continued on up toward Kossler Lake, which turns the ride from “Flagstaff” to “Superflag.” According to mapmyride, this climb is a Category 1. (The categorization scheme is taken from the European pro bike race standard. Category 1 is considered the hardest climb, and Category 5 is the easiest, though really easy climbs aren’t categorized at all. Special climbs are regarded as “Hors Categorie,” aka HC, meaning “so hard they cannot be categorized”—kind of like the “evil whose name must not be spoken.”)

I really suffered on Superflag, even on the shallower sections where I could snap photos:

I was breathing really hard on the climb, despite my heart rate being down in the 140s. It was as though my heart were saying, “Look, I’ll beat faster if you give me some more air. My job is to oxygenate the blood but I have very little oxygen to push here.” Kind of like a contractor sitting around at the job site waiting for lumber to be delivered. Altitude really does matter—coming from sea level, I find that even climbing a flight of stairs in Boulder (at 5,400 feet) is a huffing-and-puffing affair. I don’t know how anybody could compete at the US Pro Cycling Challenge who didn’t acclimate to the altitude beforehand. (Max, who has lived his whole life in Boulder, complains that he still hasn’t acclimated.)

It was of course hard to tell how much of the difficulty was the bike, how much was lack of sleep, and how much was trying to keep up with Pete. My struggle to keep up continued when we turned off on a dirt road and began descending toward Gross Reservoir. I’m no slouch at descending but riding on the dirt on that foreign bike with its too-tight brakes and cheap tires was a little scary. It was a bit like in a job interview and knowing my fly is open and there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s a very bumpy descent. I tried to do this ride back in 2005 with my brother Geoff but we had to abandon: between the two of us we had only one pump, and it fell off during this descent and was never found. We’d had to abandon the ride and head home because getting a flat on this desolate dirt road would be a real drag.

Here are Pete and I toward the end of the descent.

From there we took Coal Creek Canyon Road up to Wondervu, another Category 1 climb. Of this climb, oddly enough, I remember almost nothing. Then we headed up a freshly tarred-and-feathered road (a Category 2 climb) to the Lake Eldora ski resort. (No, the road wasn’t really feathered.)

Sustenance

By the time we made that summit and descended to Nederland, we’d ridden about 45 miles, but with all that climbing it felt like a lot more, and I was worrying about bonking (in the American, not British, sense). Dinner the night before had been a nice pork chop with a handful of fingerling potatoes: tasty, but decidedly lacking in precious carbohydrates. So when we stopped at a convenience store I went for the good stuff:

Not shown here are the Hostess fruit pies. In terms of calorie per dollar, and calorie per unit volume, they can’t be beat. I think Pete had cherry, which has a whopping 480 calories . As much as I adore the fruit-flavored varieties, I had to go with chocolate: 520 calories. These pies should be a controlled substance—there’s no reason on earth that anybody but a distance athlete should ever consume one.

More climbing

After Nederland (strangely named for a town that sits at more than 8,000 feet above sea level) we headed up the Peak To Peak Highway over two more Category 2 climbs. I must confess I used the smallest chainring quite a bit. (My wife asked about this later, and suggested that perhaps the triple really was appropriate. “Yeah,” I told her, “but only because it was such a crappy bike. It’s like a really awful restaurant where they’re thoughtful enough to give you a barf bucket.”)

We were pretty low on beverages around our highest summit, at 10,400 feet. In this photo, the half-cropped mountain on the right is Mt. Audubon, elevation 13,223 feet.

I was so oxygen-deprived and tired, I completely forgot how ugly my rental bike was. We totally should have used Pete’s bike for this photo. Anyway, if you look closely at that picture, I’m sort of smiling but it’s really a lie. Look in my eyes. There’s a lot of suffering there. At no point in the ride had I been hammering, but the miles and elevation were piling up and taking their toll.

We searched in vain for water; it was all shut off. Fortunately, the next thirty miles of the ride were virtually all downhill. The day got progressively hotter as we lost elevation. We encountered about a dozen raindrops. Eventually we arrived in Lyons, a big player in the thriving sandstone industry, where it was good and hot and we drank giant Cokes. Then we headed south on Highway 36 toward Boulder.

Home stretch

It’s a long trip back to Boulder from Lyons. Kind of a Room 101 for many a Boulder cyclist: I know more guys—myself included—who have bonked on that stretch than any other I can think of, and on shorter rides than this one. We’d gone 90 miles, which meant we had another 20 to go.

I’ll just come out and say it: my ass hurt. Real bad. I’d set the saddle a tad too high, and did I mention it was the iron maiden of bike saddles? My butt never used to hurt on long rides. I don’t know if it’s just ageing, or not enough training, or what. The modern cycling shorts don’t seem to help. They’re over-engineered these days, each chamois thicker than the last. It used to be that a pair of shorts cost $30 and had a single-ply pancake-thin chamois. Now they’re this thick puffy three-ply thing, like a short stack, and can cost upwards of $200. By this point in the ride my legs had turned more than 30,000 pedal revolutions—they should have hurt the most—and yet my ass, which had just been sitting there most of the time, was giving me the most trouble.

Even more alarming was the realization that we weren’t even heading straight back over the gently rolling hills of Highway 36. In the photo above, you see the purple mountains dead ahead on the horizon? We had those yet to climb. It was at this point in the ride that I toyed with the idea of despair, then immediately dismissed it. What good would despair do? Besides, I’d been on harder rides than this. To borrow from Faulkner, it may have killed me, but it hadn’t whupped me yet.

We took a right on Lefthand Canyon Drive. This is a pretty shallow one, but it goes along a right fur piece. After six miles we took a left on Lee Hill Drive, which is a real sumbitch of a climb. At least, that’s how I always thought of it when I lived in Boulder. The two sections together comprise a Category 2. Lee Hill Doesn’t look too steep in this photo, and yet you can tell Pete is working pretty hard—plus I’m pretty far behind.

The last climb, Wagonwheel Gap Road, was only a Category 3, but it’s dirt. I’m not sure mapmyride takes that into account. Nor could it have known how tired we were. (Or at least, how tired I was. As usual Pete showed no sign of strain. For him this may have been like an easy stroll.) I could barely keep enough traction to make the bike go, so I couldn’t take any more photos. Here’s a nice shot of clouds from earlier, anyway.

After that it was a short descent back to the house for some nice cold sugardrink. I forgot to take an “after” shot but here’s a picture of my salt-encrusted helmet.

This helmet is less than two months old (purchased after my recent crash). Note the board-stiff chin strap. Note also the little flowers, for which I’ve taken plenty of flak from my pals. But hey, I can handle it. I just did a big ride on a cheap bike with a triple crank and a front reflector!

Here are the map and elevation profile (click to zoom in).

Appendix A: Bikes on airlines

Our modern airline industry has done everything it can to make me hate them. Airlines are the number one offender in the pollution category; they’ve stopped serving meals; they charge for baggage; they impose useless security measures like putting toiletries in little plastic bags as an insult to our intelligence; they’re charging money for the privilege of sitting in an exit row; they charge for checked luggage; the frequent flier free flights are universally blacked out except certain red-eyes between Houston and Lubbock via Seattle; and they’ve made the pricing so crazily random it’s like day trading trying to book a flight. So I shoudn’t be surprised that the rate for carrying a bike has gone steadily up even as the weight of bikes has come steadily down.

A few people have told me Southwest will take bikes for free. Their website could lead the unsuspecting passenger to believe it: “Non-motorized bicycles, including Bike Friday and Co-Pilot, will be accepted in substitution of a free piece of checked baggage at no additional charge, provided the box containing the bicycle fits within the 62-inch sizing limit.” This is a bit like saying “Children eat free at Denny’s provided they are under 12 inches tall.” The smallest adult bicycle I’m aware of is a 44 cm, and it comes in a box whose overall size (length plus width plus height) is 80 inches. My bike frame alone would require a 78-inch bike. So, Southwest will take certain kids’ BMX bikes for free but beyond that, don’t get your hopes up.

Appendix B: Cannondales

Now, I realize what I’m about to say could alienate certain albertnet readers, so I’ll try to be careful. But I have to say it: Cannondales are not my favorite bikes. It’s probably totally unfair of me, and if you are a happy Cannondale owner you should really ignore me on this topic because I’m sure your bike is great. (A college teammate of mine won a ton of races on his Cannondale, and the Liquigas team rides them with vigor and aplomb.) But I’ve just had it in for those bikes for decades. Perhaps it’s because Cannondale stole Klein’s basic design back in the eighties (they were sued, but prevailed). Maybe it’s because Cannondale got their start with touring bags and a weird Velcro water bottle and so forth and I can’t shake the association. Maybe it’s because their early mountain bikes were so hard to build and service, due to their having (for gimmicky reasons) a smaller rear wheel, which fouled up the chain line and made the front derailleur hard to adjust. Or maybe it’s because every single new Cannondale to be assembled (when I worked at a Cannondale dealer) was badly scratched in the same place, and included a smashed bottle of touch-up paint. Whatever the case, I should put aside my distaste for them and be less judgmental, but I’m just not big enough. I’m sorry.

dana albert blog