Ride Report - Steepest Mile in CA

Introduction

Every few years I get together with my friend Peter for a few days of epic bike riding. We shoot for something brutal and long and, if the weather cooperates (which it didn’t in 2016), we generally achieve it. This year, Pete came all the way out here from Colorado to ride in the Santa Rosa area, where he used to attend training camps. We did four rides and this was the hardest of them. What seemed like a fairly straightforward 108-mile cruise with a mere 11,000 feet of climbing turned out to be much worse, in the best (i.e., worst) way. Read on and slake your thirst for Schadenfreude!

Executive summary

We confronted some lousy weather, a lot of climbs, and then one particular climb that in difficulty not only far exceeded anything we could have imagined, but included the steepest paved mile in all of California and the third-steepest in the country. At the summit was a douchebag in a kiosk who made us turn around, due to a road closure unknown to the Strava route planning app. This dead end cruelly lengthened an already savage ride, as we had to hammer our asses off to make it back to Santa Rosa by dark. Fortunately, we ate very well before, during, and after.

Short version

To make these rides extra epic, Pete and I largely forego training. In the month before his visit, my longest ride had been a mere 76 miles; his, even shorter. This unwise behavior gives our endeavor an extra bit of frisson; after all, anyone could pull off a really long and hard ride by actually preparing for it.

Breakfast was a leftover slice of pizza from Cibo Rustico in Santa Rosa. To be precise (and I’m fact-checking via my receipt), it was “Italian Sauage Muchroom” pizza. (How do you pronounce “Sauage”? Sewage? And much room for what?) The pizza was pretty good, even though our stinky room at the Motel 6 didn’t have a microwave oven. In fact, the fridge cost $6 extra per night … that’s how barebones this place was. And when I say “stinky” I’m not just talking about us stinking it up; it came pre-stank with the odor of stale cigarettes and the chemicals they use to mask the odor of stale cigarettes. (Yes, it was technically a non-smoking room, but when the property overall is basically a giant ashtray, the stench permeates everything.)

Now, I don’t really like cold pizza. I know many people do, but the congealed grease etc. just isn’t my thing. Fortunately, we had large cups of steaming Peet’s coffee (since our motel room also lacked a coffee maker) so I took a trick from the Dutch playbook and warmed my ‘za over my coffee cup like they do with their stroopwafels. It was slow going but worked pretty well.

Is that enough breakfast for such a long ride? Of course not, but then, what would be? The buffet court at Sizzler? So we set out on the ride knowingly undernourished. The weather threatened to be cold and overcast the entire time. (During our 47-mile ride the day before, the sun never did show its face.) Look how much clothing Pete is wearing. (I myself neglected to bring leg warmers because I was foolish enough to trust the weather forecast.)

But then, two hours in, after a couple of painful climbs, the sun came out. Things warmed up, and we did a few more climbs, and then hit the big climb—oh my god, that climb—and that’s when shit got dark. I don’t mean it got literally dark, until it literally did, but that was hours later. First we had a lot of hammering to do. In case you only care about food, I’ll save the details of the climb, and its horrific aftermath, for the full report. Let’s talk about dinner now.

Having seen Los Molcajetes Bar and Grill from the road, and having decided it looked lively (since Cibo Rustico the night before had been a bit quiet), we headed over there to refuel. This was of course after a palliative beer, showering (without shampoo, this being the Motel Sux), and a sufficiently long rest that we could walk again. Los Molcajetes was pretty well hopping, but the music was terrible. It’s not like I’m a snob, but this sounded like somebody’s five-year-old pounding on the keys of a piano, or perhaps a harpsichord. It was a tune of maybe seven or eight notes repeated ad infinitum. And the waitress was powerless to recommend a beer … perhaps she doesn’t drink. She could have just lied and said, “Oh yeah, the Farting Fathers Brewing Scuzzy Suds & Saliva Ale is amazing,” or she could’ve hedged and said “Well, the Locker-Room Lager is popular,” but she seemed almost embarrassed to be asked at all. So we tossed the dice on beers from Laughing Monk and I don’t remember a thing about them. We were pretty out of it, honestly.

But the salsa was good … there were two kinds and they were nice and fiery (or was it just my scorched throat?). There was also some cheese goo that hit the spot, though our motor control was barely up to the task of dipping our chips in it. My chille [sic] relleno burrito was huge and very tasty. (What is it with Santa Rosa restaurateurs and their spelling?) There was this odd orange sauce, almost like a romesco, over the top which was tastier than I’m making it sound. Pete had the carne asada plate and although the idea of meat made all kinds of sense, I almost always get a chile relleno burrito if it’s on offer.

Long version

A couple of hours in, when the gloom lifted, I put on my vest and we descended in the sunshine for a bit. A little over 50 miles in we reached a little gas station convenience store near Lower Lake and I indulged in a couple Hostess cupcakes (chocolate with trans-fat “kreme” filling) and a large can of Coke. At checkout I encountered this big biker guy (well, he looked like a biker, anyway; I didn’t happen to see his hog). This dude had tattoos on his face. The tats were words, and I was really curious what they said, but I was afraid to look at the guy for long enough to read them. I could well imagine him saying, “What the fuck you lookin’ at!” and slamming me into the Doritos display. So I just moved along. Pete told me later that the dude was friendly with the cashier and they were chatting out by our bikes. “Look how skinny those bikes are!” she said, and he replied, “Yeah, those dudes look super fit.” But probably that was just the meth talking.

Okay, that was inappropriate. I really shouldn’t assume someone’s a meth-head just because he has tattoos on his face. He might have been a really nice guy. His tats might have said something like “I’m thankful” or “Love wins.” In fact, maybe it was Pete who was on meth. Or hell, it could’ve been me! No, no, no, take none of this seriously. We did this ride pan y agua! Shoot, I should probably delete this whole paragraph, but I never edit my ride reports. It’s too much hassle.

Clear Lake is pretty.

After Clear Lake we hit a hard section that was mostly uphill for about 13 miles, gaining over 1,500 feet. The scenery was nice and my tasty cupcake snack was serving me well, but I have to admit, the climbing was starting to get old. And then we hit Socrates Mine Road.

Let me say first that we had no idea what we were getting into. Even though I’m the Californian, I did nothing to contribute to the route planning. Pete used this fancy feature of Strava where you tell it how many miles you want and what kind of terrain (e.g., flat, hilly, super hilly) and it gives you several options. There was no disclaimer like “This route includes a climb that will have you PUKING FOR DECADES.” Yeah, we knew we had some vertical gain left to accumulate, but never expected anything like Socrates Mine Road.

This climb is bad enough on paper: as detailed on the PJAMM Cycling website, it climbs about 1,800 feet in 3.5 miles. Discounting a couple short downhill bits, it boasts an average gradient of 10%. But that’s not what makes it so hard; neither is the fact that we started on it over 70 miles into our ride. The tough part is that 26% of the climb is between 10-15%, 17% of it is between 15-20%, and 5% is more than a 20% grade! The steepest mile of the climb averages 16.3%, making it the steepest paved mile in California. Look at this schematic from PJAMM:

Increasing the brutality was the totally crappy condition of the road: it was cracked into rough cubes, like a pan of over-baked brownies. If you rumpled this road just a bit it’d be like the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix. The poor surface could have been due to a big fire some years back. There’s not much scenery unless you like looking at burnt trees.

Fortunately, there’s nobody up there so you can hear a car coming from really far away. (No more than two cars passed us the whole time; in fact, maybe it was just one and I hallucinated the other.) Pete’s gearing was a pretty stingy 34x25. I had a 27 cog in the back; between that and my lugubrious cadence (between 20-40 rpm), I was well off Pete’s pace. (This is always the case when the going gets tough.) At one point Pete stopped for a bit so he could snap photos of me weaving my way back and forth across the road, which was the only way I could keep from tipping over.

God, such misery. Of course I knew I’d suffer on this ride, but who knew a climb could actually be this awful? Climbs I used to think of as hard, like Mount Diablo and Mount Evans, now look, in retrospect, like playgrounds. How long could this go on? I had no idea. It seemed that forever wasn’t out of the question. Fortunately, I knew better than to pretend I had any choice in the matter. I pondered (non-verbally) this sentiment from my Everest Challenge “Pep Talk” post: “The trick is to pretend you have no choice and to take one pedal stroke at a time, riding like a robot.  Climbing stupid, you might say.  Not ‘climbing stupidly,’ which I would never recommend, but ‘climbing as though you were stupid.’” I proceeded with the mindset of pure fatalism, as though it could never occur to me that this climb, this route, this ride, indeed this very sport, were actually optional.

Have my arms ever been worked so hard while cycling? Absolutely not. I logged over two miles more than Pete on this ride, and that’s probably because I was weaving so much. It was ridiculous: I was barely making progress toward the summit. If this description is getting tedious, good—so was the climb. At least you, albertnet reader, don’t have to fucking pedal! You’re just sitting there, feeling all butt-hurt that I’m going on so long about this—but at least your butt doesn’t actually hurt, and you can just close your laptop or toss aside your phone and go do something more fun. I was trapped on that damn climb and everything hurt. If those cracks in the road had been any deeper they’d have stopped me cold and I’d still be out there.

But, eventually, we did reach the summit. Now the ride would get really good: one more climb (surely easier than this one), and it’d be flat or downhill for the final 25 miles. A well-earned victory lap, you might say. But that’s not what happened. Instead, just as the road tipped downhill, we came upon a closed gate with a kiosk and this big dumb kid sitting in it. “You can’t go,” he said (and these were probably the first words he’d uttered all day). We asked why not. “Not allowed,” he said, after managing his second thought of the day: another salvo in his battle against mental bankruptcy. We assumed the road blockage had something to do with a geothermal power plant up there; maybe they’re afraid of terrorists or something. But Google Maps and Strava had both indicated the road was open to through traffic. Pete asked the kiosk wizard if he had a map. “Of what?” the cretin asked, dumbfounded. Pete replied, “Of your ass. I want to see if I can find your head in there.” No, Pete didn’t actually say this, he’s far too much of a gentleman. Of course the guy had no map of anything. So Pete started looking at his phone, trying to figure out another route. “I’m going to have to ask you to move along now,” the dunce said (and this might have been the longest verbal utterance of his life). I guess he considered our very presence a dire threat to the geothermal operation. And so, contrary to all human impulse, we actually turned around and headed back down Socrates Mine Road.

It wasn’t a very fun descent because we had to brake so hard. Pete’s brakes eventually started hissing even louder than mine. Even at the speeds that naturally result from such a grade (and I note that the road boasts three runaway truck ramps), the descent seemed to take forever.

(A few final footnotes. One: a photo on the PJAMM site shows a “NO OUTLET” sign at the base of the climb, which obviously would have been helpful; our theory is that this sign burned down in the fire. Two: another sign, also no longer extant, warned that “This area can expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects … including arsenic, benzene, asbestos, crystalline silica, and radionuclides.” Three: I’m assuming that on top of all this, every time a cyclist rides up Socrates Mine Road, God kills a kitten.)

Well, shit. Now we had about forty miles left to go, and two major climbs. Of course we hadn’t budgeted any time for this, so making it back to the Motel Sux by nightfall was going to be a major challenge. Exhausted as we were, we had to hammer. Into a headwind, of course.

“Get on my wheel,” Pete said. “Go as hard as you can. If you start to fall off, yell out and I’ll slow up [a tiny bit, just enough to put you on the absolute rivet so you won’t slow us down too much, you wanker],” he said. (No, he didn’t say the stuff in brackets; my brain filled that in. Accurately.) Damn, it was like a team time trial except I was too lame to even take a turn at the front. And it went on and on. I was no longer capable of pedaling in anything like a circle. Instead my legs took turns throwing punches at the pedals … and I punch like a girl. (Note to my daughters: I didn’t know you ever read my blog! And I’m just kidding! I know either of your could totally kick my ass!)

Our last big climb was 2.2 miles at 6.3%. At the base, some jerk in a pickup truck, in the opposite lane heading toward us, angrily yelled, “Fuck YOU!” I really don’t know what his problem was, other than presumably feeling that the existence of other, probably superior, people on this planet is automatic cause for maximum outrage. “I’m not angry at you … I’m just disappointed,” I did not say to him. It’s actually too bad his outburst didn’t anger me, because anger might have helped fuel my effort. That climb, short and shallow though it truly was, hurt so bad. Amazingly, we made pretty good time up it, staying right around 10 mph. At the top we stopped briefly to split an energy bar. Straddling my bike, I wasn’t even sure I could stay upright. I collapsed onto the handlebars, my arms on the brake hoods, my head dangling between them. Naturally, Pete laughed at me. You would have, too.

We set off again, and I have to say, only in hindsight do I truly appreciate how well Pete and I get along, even under circumstances like this. When he told me to ride as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get dropped, I could have said, “Oh, easy for you to say, Mr. Big-Shot-Former-Pro, with all your talent and strength and character! You’re nothing but a big bully!” and that’d have been well within spec for a knackered middle-aged cyclist with a 40% hematocrit. Meanwhile, Miss Manners would’ve surely forgiven Pete had he said, “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, poor Mr. Parasite is all bent out of shape because he has to pedal harder than he wants to even though he’s getting a free ride without having to fight this damn headwind for even five seconds because we both know he’s too much of a pussy!” Instead we just grimly, and silently, got on with it. I acknowledged to myself the gift of this draft, no matter how unpleasant the pace was, while Pete presumably thanked his lucky stars I’m not even more weak and worthless on a bicycle.

So, what more is there to say? We hit another convenience store, right around dusk, and I wondered if it might make sense to summon a Lyft car from there (Uber is dead to me), and have one of us stay behind with the bikes while the other fetched my car from the motel. But there was a big sign that said something like, “ABSOLUTELY NO LOITERING. GET YOUR STUFF AND GET OUT OR WE’LL SEND YOU HOME TO MOTHER IN A CARDBOARD BOX.” Plus, we’re not quitters. So Pete ate some more of the little gummy bears he favors, I inhaled two more delicious Hostess cupcakes, and we headed back out. Somehow we made it over Petrified Forest Road (1.4 miles at 9.1%), notwithstanding our petrified legs.

And, eventually, as civil twilight gave its last gasp, we homed in on the Motel Sux. Needless say, in the final mile Pete’s rear tire blew out—PCCCCHHEWWW!—and he didn’t even flinch. Just rode it in.

Well, you know the rest. For $6 a night, at least the 100-decibel motel mini-fridge did a good job of keeping our beers cold. These were Racer 5s, just right for relaxing our destroyed muscles. Here is the obligatory post-ride Beck’st. Note that I’m not in any way mugging for the camera here. This is as close to a smile as I could manage.

So: was this ride even worth it? Of course. This is the kind of ordeal that case-hardens a person. And we’re going to need that hardness as we continue our descent into middle age and, eventually, decrepitude. Wish us luck, and check back in a year or two for a full report of our next exploit.

Ride stats

• 119.37 miles
• 8:37:47 ride time
• 13.8 average speed (ouch!)
• 11,896 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 117 bpm average heart rate
• 151 bpm max heart rate
• 67 rpm average cadence
• 3,886 kilocalories burned

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Epic NorCal Road Ride - Day 1

Introduction

Every couple of years, my friend Peter and I get together for an epic road ride, usually in the Boulder, Colorado area. We’ll never live up to the best ride we did, which was 200 miles long and so far back I can’t remember the year, but we try to get as close as possible. Our last would-be epic ride, in 2016, kicked our asses so bad we had to cut it short and relegate it to “quasi-epic” status.

This year we’re both turning fifty so we decided we needed to redeem ourselves. Pete contrived a pair of brutal routes, this time on my turf. So we hit Sonoma County last Friday, and Napa on Saturday. They both hit back—hard. If you’ve always disliked me, read on for your first dose of Schadenfreude: Epic NorCal Ride - Day One.

Executive summary

The route packed a big surprise that damaged our bikes. The mileage, the climbing, and our own foolish refusal to act our age caused us much suffering. In other words, the ride was a rousing success.

Short version

Pete and I trained hard for this ride, for upwards of, well, four weeks. Up until mid-May, my longest ride of the year was 31 miles. Pete didn’t do much better. That didn’t stop him from downloading a challenging 106-mile route from Strava that was based on the Levi’s Granfondo route from 2012. I’d done that ride all the way back in 2009 (click here for my report) and had fond memories (get it—fond?). Without any support, and too few miles in our legs, we would have our work cut out for us.

With that in mind, we hit upon the ingenious strategy of carbo-loading the night before on nothing but greasy happy-hour snacks at a Santa Rosa brewery. We had giant onion rings, small but tasty “Asian chicken bites,” a Reuben slider, hella fries with mayonnaise, and deep-fried calamari. Our rationale for this unorthodox preparation was fiscal efficiency. I mean, the very same onion rings that normally go for $9 were only $3 during happy hour. Who could resist? Then we found an ice cream joint where I had the “homemade Oreo” flavor and I learned, to my surprise, that this place actually makes their own Oreos to put in the ice cream. They charged me $1 extra for a cone, but I didn’t care because a) it was one of those highly groovy waffle cones, and b) the creamista stuffed the whole damn cone with ice cream. Good times!

Our pre-ride breakfast was bagels and coffee at a local place. Being a notorious cheap bastard, I suggested we get one bagel with cream cheese and one without, because they always give you too much cream cheese so you can transfer half of it to the plain bagel and save a buck or two. Well, they must have heard us scheming, or maybe they’re just stingy, but the donor bagel was the most under-cheesed I’ve ever encountered. Curses!

During the Day One ride we enjoyed spectacular scenery, tough climbs, a breathtaking coastal descent, and Hostess fruit pies at a little grocery. I chased my pie with a Klondike ice cream bar. The ride got tougher from there because the road we’d chosen was closed due to, well, having utterly gone missing due to all the rains here. So what started as a road ride became a mountain bike ride.

That night we put on the dog at LoCoco’s Cucina Rustica: lots of French (i.e., white) bread with this garlicky tapenade; a Caesar salad with anchovies; deep-fried calamari; tortellini in a heavy cream sauce; and a Lagunitas IPA to dissolve all the fat. As much food as that was, I could have eaten a second meal just like it. Great restaurant, by the way, though we almost had to kill this loud douchebag hanging out near the bar where we were sitting. He must have been drunk and/or thought he was funny.

Full report

Peter is a medical doctor, which is great news for me. It means I can look a waiter right in the eye and say, “My doctor has advised me to eat more saturated fats … is the cream sauce good and rich?” It also means Pete goes into these rides even more tired than I do, giving me a leg up which I desperately need. (He was a pro racer and has always been way stronger than I, in fitness, stamina, and character.) I think he’d worked some overnights in the ICU before this trip because almost as soon as we got to our motel, he demanded we turn the lights out. It was like 9 freakin’ p.m.! I figured we could at least talk for a bit, so I told him this great joke: 

Jean Paul Sartre goes into a little Parisian coffee shop and tells the waiter, “Bring me a coffee with sugar but no cream.” The waiter heads to the kitchen, only to return a couple minutes later to announce, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Sartre, we’re all out of cream. Can I bring you a coffee with no milk?”

This didn’t elicit so much as a chuckle, which didn’t surprise me too much because when I tried this joke on my wife and daughter I got nothing but blank stares. I told Pete, “Perhaps this joke requires some basic knowledge of existential philosophy,” but still he didn’t utter a sound. I realized then that this albeit brief joke had actually put him to sleep.

Here we are at the start of Day One.

Pretty mediocre motel, but I’ve stayed in much worse … at least it was non-smoking. As for local amenities, you couldn’t do much better than this junk-built obelisk just a few blocks away:

Look closely—it’s made (well, adorned) largely of (with) bike parts. How fitting!

The first climb of the day wasn’t very hard, and the weather was still cool, especially with all these trees breathing on us.

The only problem was that my saddle—which had been creaking and clicking increasingly over the past few months—started making more and more racket until it sounded like a Geiger counter with the volume turned up. I dismounted to investigate and dislodged a little curl of metal that had been part of either the saddle rail or the post. Well aware of the dangers of stripping something, I tightened the main bolt as much as I dared, and then—hallelujah!—the saddle shut right up.

As if Murphy wouldn’t tolerate his law being broken, on the first descent Pete hit a cattle guard wrong and put a giant dent and flat spot in his front rim. It was so bad we had to lower one of his brake pads so it wouldn’t hit his tire. That kind of put a damper on the descents, with his braking super grabby, but of course at our age we can’t be bombing the downhills anyway.

Here we’re stopped for a bit of a rest under the redwoods.

We cruised past the Cazadero Music Camp and stopped at Raymond’s Bakery for water. The front door was open, but the bakery wasn’t. The gal there seemed inordinately apologetic and happily filled our bottles for us, and even served us bread and butter on the house. NOOICE!

As we made our way up the first major climb, the lush tree cover eventually dwindled until we reached a more sparse but very scenic vista.

It was a steep, scabby road with very little traffic, just perfect for tiring our legs.

We descended for a while, and I guess we tackled the second big climb of the day, but oddly enough I don’t remember a single thing about it. (Perhaps my brain still hasn’t recovered from being simmered in its own juices on Day Two—but I see I’m getting ahead of myself.)

After some descending we reached the coast. I told Pete this was Lake Tahoe but I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe me.

I spent some time admiring this well rusted barbed wire. This is because I once wrote a research paper for history class on the topic of barbed wire. (Or was I just stalling?)

The ride just kept getting more beautiful.

Highway One gives some famously breathtaking views of the coast.

I decided to take a selfie just to prove that I was actually on this ride, and that Pete wasn’t just accompanied by a professional photographer, the paparazzi, or a drone.

The best parts of the descent down the coast, of course, aren’t recorded because I had both hands on the bars. The temperature was perfect, the road (mostly) smooth, the curves nice and sweeping, and there was even this hawk flying along above and ahead of me, dipping and soaring and doing all kinds of unnecessary maneuvers, just for the sheer fun of it, and I realized suddenly that I was having my Spalding Grey “perfect moment.”

As if things couldn’t get any better, we stopped at the Jenner C Store for some refined sugars. (There’s a point in any veteran cyclist’s epic ride when energy bars just don’t cut it anymore.) The Hostess fruit pie is the all-time junk food champion, packing almost 500 calories into its wallet-sized shell. Just for good measure I combed through the store’s freezer for their most highly caloric ice cream bar, which ends up being a Klondike bar at 300 calories.

It was only when we turned inland that things started to get tricky. First off, the road was closed. Worse, as we continued on beyond the barrier, we came to a section that Caltrans (or somebody) had apparently toyed with the idea of rebuilding. They’d dumped there a bed of very small rocks that, with the aid of a steamroller, might have created a usable surface. It was just barely rideable, and the occasional clanking of a stone against my rim gave me the willies. I kept a light touch on the handlebars and tried to float my bike along. Fortunately, the stones gradually dissipated and we found more and more smooth places to aim our bikes.

Finally the pavement ended altogether which was a real treat … it felt like carpet compared to the busted-up road.

We came across a giant fallen trunk and Pete tried to jump it. He almost made it but his bike got snagged.

Okay, I confess, I made that up. The photo above was staged (but not Photoshopped). Things got a bit easier from there, for a bit.

The only really hard part now was that we had our third major climb to tackle. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the traction, particularly in sections where water was still flowing over the trail. I couldn’t climb out of the saddle and there were pitches of more than 10%. We were relieved when we reached the second road closure gate, indicating we’d have actual asphalt again. Here’s the view back toward where we’d ridden.

By this point, 80 miles in, this ride was already the longest of the year for both of us. We were good and fried after close to 9,000 feet of climbing and almost seven hours in (and out of) the saddle. We looked forward to an uneventful and relaxing mostly-downhill cruise back to Santa Rosa.

Ha! Of course that didn’t happen. We were coasting down this smooth and (thankfully) straight road when—BLAM!—my rear tire blew out. Motherfrockle! I checked it out, and discovered that my sidewall, which had looked oddly dried-out and a bit hairy before the ride, now looked totally chowdered. I guess it was all the stones it had been grazing against during the off-road-action segment of our tour. Sure enough, a sidewall gash had broken all the way through, so I had to put a boot in there. (For a full dissertation on tire boots, click here.)

Now I had this big lump in my tire, probably worse than a boot usually causes because the whole tire casing was totally knackered and closer to a wonton wrapper than a sidewall. My bike rode like a mule with a gimpy leg, the tire lump giving me the highly unpleasant feedback of lub-lub-lub-lub. This made our final 20 miles or so a bit unnerving. But it was a great route along an endless walking/biking path near a river. We even saw some cute downy ducklings following along behind their momma duck (or maybe just the sitter).

We finally made it back to the motel, and following strict orders from my doctor I indulged in a recovery beer. Here is the official Beck’st:

After a long ride like this, it’s tempting to look down at your legs and think you got a suntan.

Of course this is an illusion; the “suntan” washes right off in the shower. It’s really just road grime clinging to the sunscreen.

Considering the difficulty of what we’d just done, we felt pretty good. But then, Day One isn’t about utterly destroying ourselves; it’s about totally depleting ourselves so that Day Two can properly finish us off. I won’t kid you, I was good and fried … but well knew the real beating was still to come. Watch albertnet for my Day Two report, coming soon!

Ride stats

Here are the stats based on my old-fashioned bike computer, with the stats from Pete’s Strava file in parenthesis. (Which is more accurate? Beats me … why not go with the more impressive number on a stat-by-stat basis?)

• 106.9 miles (104.3)
• 6:18:40 ride time
• 14.7 mph average speed (14.5)
• 8,239 feet cumulative elevation gain (8,947)
• 29.6 miles total climbing
• 34.3 miles total descending

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Tour of California - Riding the Stage 1 Course

Introduction

This little story was intended as a freelance article for a cycling website.  That didn’t end up working out, so here it is, over a week late, when all the Tour of California racers have gone home or on to other races.

Tour of California – Riding the Stage 1 Course

What’s the best way to watch the Amgen Tour of California?  Well, if you’re wanting a blow-by-blow of the action, TV is really best.  If you want to see it live, you can catch the finish—which will have the biggest, loudest crowd—or, to get a better view of the riders, station yourself on one of the big climbs.

Watching live offers an extra treat for serious cyclists:  you can ride the course, or part of it, and then watch the racers.  What other sport lets you experience the venue firsthand mere hours before the race itself?  Imagine if you got to go throw a football around in your home team’s stadium, or play catch on the baseball diamond with your friends, just before a pro game.  But even that wouldn’t stack up to riding a bike race course, because with ball games the venue usually doesn’t matter much, whereas a bike race course makes all the difference in the world.

Today I rode the main loop of Stage 1 with my old cycling pal Dave, a couple hours before the racers, and then we drove to the finish in Santa Rosa.  Riding the course first gives you great insight into the race—how hard are those climbs, really?—and anticipating the race gives you more motivation during the ride.

Once the flurry of logistic details was behind us—driving, parking, deciding how many layers to wear (it was surprisingly chilly today)—we finally had nothing but open road to occupy us.  This give me the mental space to finally start thinking about the race.  I’d been distracted by the normal work and family obligations, and also—not incidentally—the Giro d’Italia, coinciding with this race but 6,000 miles and nine time zones away.  With many of the same teams racing in both places, I’ve about gone crazy trying to remember who’s racing where.

So as we made our way around the course today I finally had a chance to really think about the Tour of California.  Whom would I be rooting for and really watching closely?  It’s not as simple as supporting your home team; the sport is too international for that, and my favorite riders are the ones who have the most flair (think Bernard Hinault), or whom I feel some kind of special connection to.  A tricky aspect of pro cycling for Americans is finding ways to really care about the racers.  It doesn’t help that so many of them don’t speak English, and it’s no coincidence that my favorites tend to be from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, or Holland (where everybody knows English).

This morning I was thinking about Robert Gesink, the Dutch rider who won the best young rider’s competition in the Tour of California in 2007, his first year as a pro.  The next year, he won the toughest stage of this race.  But I’m mainly interested in him because last fall, he crashed training and broke his femur.  I did the same thing, a couple months later, and am looking to his progress for inspiration.  I cannot imagine being ready to race at any level, much less against a top pro field, two months from now.  I’m just happy to be on the bike at all.

I also have made it a hobby to track the progress of Laurens ten Dam, another Dutchman, who was sixth overall here last year.  I like to think of him as my old nemesis:  we used to race together.  I’d like to tell you I taught him everything he knows, but that’s not exactly true.  It’s not even true that I taught him everything I know.  In fact I taught him nothing, and only raced against him once.  This was in 2003, when he was an up-and-coming amateur and I was reaching my sell-by date.  We both raced La Marmotte, a brutal cyclo-sportif in France, and to be completely honest, I never even saw him.  He won and I was, well … a bit further back.  (Okay, I was 189th.)

One rider I’d like to see win this year is Tom Danielson.  He first caught my attention way back in 2004 when he won the Mount Evans Hill Climb in Colorado (where I grew up).  The record he set that day still stands.  Mount Evans is a brutal race:  twenty-eight miles of climbing, peaking at over 14,000 feet elevation—the highest paved road in North America.  More recently, Danielson has captured my imagination by really hitting his stride just last year, at thirty-three, when he was the top American in the Tour de France—his first.  I’m ten years older and always looking for encouragement that I’m not just running out the clock on my life.  (A few years back, my younger daughter, then around five, asked me, “Daddy, can you die of middle age?”)

Today I was feeling all my years and of course my weakened leg.  That my right leg warmer was sagging didn’t help my morale.  The weather wasn’t what I’d hoped—overcast, cool, and damp—but it was of course way better than last year, when I took my family up to Lake Tahoe to a rental cabin so we could watch the first Tour of California stage, only to get a foot of snow that morning and have the race canceled.  I wonder if there are still Europeans who expect to come out here and enjoy “Baywatch” conditions.  At least the locale is pretty:  quaint little towns like Occidental with old inns and a saloon; deep, lush ferns along the road; a giant hand-carved statue of Babe Ruth and his impressive girth (a true American-style athlete).

And it was as breathtaking as ever when, around Bodega Bay, the ocean first came into view.  I smelled it before I saw it:  a pleasantly rank, salty, briny smell.  This was a real ocean breeze, not like my “Ocean Breeze” scented shampoo which of course smells nothing like an ocean breeze (and good thing).  Does the Pacific smell different from the Atlantic ?  I didn’t get to ask any of our visiting European racers.

As we cruised along, my friend and I chatted.  All that’s worth reporting about this is that we mostly managed to avoid a sad and tedious topic:  doping in cycling.  I hope I’m not being naïve in saying things seem to be getting better.  For a couple years there, my riding pals and I couldn’t help gossiping about all the positive tests and ongoing cases and appeals and suspicions wracking the pro peloton.  Today, the topic of drugs only came up once.  As we began a tricky descent, Dave said, “If you wanna go fast, don’t let me stop you—just wait at the bottom.”  He’s got two titanium rods in his back and is understandably cautious.  My descending mojo is gone, too. 

“Dude, get real,” I told him.  “I’m such a timid descender now, I’m starting to get free Vagifem samples in the mail.”

“Tell me that’s not a real product.”

“It is!  I know a sales rep.  It’s prescription only:  you know, ‘Ask your doctor if Vagifem is right for you.’”

“Isn’t that name kind of redundant?  I mean, Vagiman I could understand … but fem?”

“So if you were on a strict regimen of Vagifem, would you call it a Vagimen?”

           

I know that’s not very enlightened of us, but we don’t smoke cigars or go on fishing trips or have poker night.  Maybe we were just giddy from managing a day-long furlough from our families—on Mother’s Day, no less.

If there’s a such thing as karmic voodoo, perhaps it struck me on the hardest of the KOM climbs.  It was a monster.  Dave took off ahead to school some other cyclists and to let me suffer in peace instead of watching me with pity, the way you’d look at a dog with a giant satellite-dish ring on its neck to keep it from biting its scabs.  My bad leg wouldn’t fire right and my good leg was getting progressively sorer from picking up the slack.  I’m too proud to ride a compact crank and was having a lot of trouble turning the pedals.  What if I just ground to a halt?  To buck up my courage, I started daydreaming about the latest heroic exploits of my favorite racers.  Since the Tour of California was just getting underway, miles behind me, I thought about the Giro d’Italia.

What I found most heroic might surprise you, given the new stars this year’s race has already produced.  I was thinking about the team time trial, and how the young Peter Stetina was dropped from his Garmin-Barracuda team just before the finish.  No, that itself wasn’t heroic, but I can only imagine he was absolutely on the rivet for most of the race.  He’s no slouch as a time trialist, but is built a lot more like a climber than a team time trialist—and here he was, supporting the winning ride with the best team in the business. 

As a national collegiate champion in theTTT, I know full well the immense pressure this event involves.  In a regular race, if you ride poorly you don’t doom your team.  Sure, they miss your support, but you don’t literally spoil the ride of every one of your teammates.  In a team time trial, there’s nowhere to hide.  If you take weak pulls, you doom the team.  You have to communicate well—which can include swallowing your pride and sitting out of the rotation a few times if you need to—and if you don’t communicate, you doom your team.  And a great stage racer like Stetina introduces another potential problem:  as one of their GC hopefuls, having finished 21st in last year’s Giro (the top American, and third in the young-rider classification), if he got dropped in this TTT, the team would have to consider waiting for him.  That could sink their chances at the stage win and the pink jersey.  He must have killed himself to not let the team down.

What does this have to do with me getting up this dang hill?  Well, Stetina dug deep and managed—though “only” being excellent at TTTs, to be brilliant in this one.  So maybe if I dug deep, I could manage, though being literally lame, to be competent on this climb.  And so I did.  It helped that spectators along the course warmed up for the real action by cheering me on.  One guy even took a bunch of photos, which was flattering until I remembered that nobody uses film anymore, and he was only practicing on me to better photograph the real racers later.  No matter:  I managed to grope my way to the top eventually.

At the finish, we got to watch the race on the JumboTron, seeing the same climbs we’d just been on, and even the same spectators:   “Look, there’s that dude with the Mohawk!”  Watching the JumboTron at the finish line is a lot better than watching your TV at home:  it’s like a really rowdy open-air sports bar.  As the racers approached, everybody started screaming and beating on the road barriers in unison, making a thundering racket you could feel through the ground.  It was almost frightening, reminding me of the power of a giant mob, but of course these were friendly fans.  The pack came by in a blur—my first in-the-flesh sighting of the racers.  And then it was over.  We watched the replays.  Glorious.