Death Ride wrap-up

It was good. Hard. Long. Getting on the bike at 6:00 am and rolling back to the cabin at 6:30 pm makes for a loooong day. Fred described it best: "You know what it's like to go for a 4-5 hour ride and think 'that was a long ride', but in this case, it's a whole day that disappeared while you were on the bike."

The track here shows the route - out and back to the far side bottom of Monitor Pass, same for Ebbett's, and then to the top of Carson's and then back. 127 miles total. Max speed: 53.6 mph



We got in on Thursday, assembled from various flight schedules, picked up luggage, bikes, and drove to the cabin. Along the way, little would we know that the playing of Rammstein's Amerika would result in it becoming the theme song for Team Old Style. We got unpacked at the cabin and went for a Massive Dinner and grocery shopping trip. Ate at a Basque restaurant family-style. That means sit down at long tables and food just starts showing up. No need for a menu - your only choice is what kind of meat you want, otherwise you eat what's put in front of you. And then food just keeps on coming... and coming... and coming...

Needless to say that with all the "Got Picon?" joke-y shirts and bumper stickers and such, some of us were compelled to try it. Not exactly going to become a household name anytime soon, but definitely better than moutai. A little bit of Port, some soaking in Diana's hot tub, some more Port, some staring at the stars, and then Team Old Style vent off to schleep.

Friday morning saw us putting bikes together by the light of the morning sun. Beautiful scenery, but dudes be looking pretty rough around the edges early in the morning. Faces only a mother could love. Figured we'd go for a ride to loosen the legs a bit and see what the countryside looked like - went for 40-miler with 3000 ft of up in it, out to Markleeville and the hot springs (beautiful, by the way) and then back past the cabin and out along Airport Rd, which is... duh, by the airport (basically, a strip of asphalt that has FAA signs on it - not much else).

So then we get to the sketchy bit - on the map when I was plotting a route for the GPS to guide us through, I thought "hmm... the dotted line usually means dirt road. Looks like this road suddenly becomes dirt. Think we should re-route? Nah. Just power through. It's only 1-2 miles of dirt. How bad can it be?" Well, it was the chunkiest bunch of buried sharp rocks I've ever had to dodge on a road bike with dainty tires. Steve apparently dodged all of 'em except one, so he got the first and only (as far as I know) flat of the trip. Good time for pictures, and I gotta say, if you're going to flat, you might as well flat in a nice little valley next to a pretty little lake.

So then we get back from the warmup ride and go to registration and find out that, contrary to our imaginings, registering as a team (even an ersatz one) does not simplify registration. It actually was more than frustrating, and there were other "teams" in the same boat. They told us to come back at 9pm and it'd all be sorted out. Annoying, to say the least. But the good thing was that there was lots of pretty eye-candy at the registration expo. I gotta say, I could get used to showing up at events for endurance athletes. Death Ride, dirt-triathlon, crit... damn there's a lot of toned, tanned, beautiful women hanging out wearing snug/skimpy clothing over their hardbodies. Meeeow.

With time to waste, we figure it's a good time to shop for brake pads and cassette for Andrew (his pads on the Cane Creek brakes were heinously hard and slippery), grab a coffee, and then head over Monitor Pass (the first one on the route for the event) to go to the casino with the all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner. Along the way, seeing the road and the climb, that's when Andrew started metaphorically shitting his pants about the ride. He hadn't been getting any training in because of work and new baby at home, was feeling out of shape and heavy, and seeing the length and grade of the climb had him moaning and keening in the back seat. Eventually we got to the casino, it was a no-go for spaghetti, so we found a pizza/pasta joint down the road and ordered a shitload of food. 5 dudes polished away: 2 orders of spaghetti/meatballs, 2 orders of ravioli, 1 order of lasagna, and 2 pizzas. It was... a lot. All in the service of preparing for a long day ahead. Some burping, farting, and registration details later, we were tucked away in bed for a good night's sleep and a 4am wakeup.

The next morning was early. We elected to wait until the sun was up so that we wouldn't have to carry lights, so we hit the road at about 6:00. While still together on the Montior Pass climb, we got a kind fellow Death Rider to snap a photo of us while we were still all riding together. It's silly to try to stick together over 130 miles - people's rhythms on the climbs just don't match up, and everyone needs to go at their own pace. But for the first pass at least, we were reasonably together.

Later on in the day saw us catching up with each other at the rest/feed stops, and in at least one instance, Steve and Karl seem to have met up in the porta-potty.

Of course, some of the times we would meet up because someone was just getting to the top, and the other had already been down the other side and had come back up, but still, it was nice to be able to catch up and see how everyone was feeling. And it may have seemed silly getting matching jerseys before the ride, but it sure is easy to spot your buddies in rest areas and when they are blasting down at you at 50 mph. Not only that, but we got more than a few nice compliments on our stylish Old Style jerseys. So there. Team Old Style in tha' hizzie.

Technology-wise, what I feared might happen, happened.. the battery in my Garmin 305 wasn't up to the task of a 12-hour day. I got the "battery low" message at the start of the 5th climb, but wanting to record the high-speed descending, I turned it off for the climb and turned it on before blasting down (thus the missing 17 miles at mile 95).

When it comes to blasting down, I might weigh 200 lbs, and that's a non-trivial thing when you're trying to turn the 39x23 up the 10% and 12%. But when the direction is down? Oh, it's a different story. It's awfully easy to go fast down the hill.

I don't have balls big enough to let go and bomb down Ebbett's at Stupid Speed - there's some wacky bits on the way down. But Carson is wide open, and though it was open to traffic, there wasn't much (traffic). Besides, who in their right mind is going to try to pass a cyclist in the middle of the lane going 50 mph when there's oncoming traffic? None that I saw. Motorists were really pretty easy-going on the road. Heck, there's 3000 cyclists out there. By the time they got to passing me, they were used to the idea of bikes on the road.

So yeah, back to the "it was a long ride" part - my tender sitting places hurt a bit on Saturday night. Not to say that there weren't breaks from pedaling to be had - water and food stops at the top and bottom of each mountain pass. But at the top of Carson's Pass when I got back on my bike, clipping in and sitting down... yoinks. Cabin proprietress and masseuse extraordinare Diana tells me that it wasn't a sore muscle, but likely a tissue bruise (and we'll call it "minor", I know she meant to say so, even though the word didn't come out of her mouth)

So did I mention that I was pedaling a 39x23 on this? Yeah, that was stupid. Manly and awe-inspiring... but stupid.

Sure, it gave me something to brag about later at the cabin (i.e. "you buncha weines with your compact cranks and 11-27s... sissies, all o' youse."), but for many, many hours I would finding myself riding next to people spinning a much easier gear (triples, or 34x28s) and silently lust for their gearing. Oh yeah, and the simple fact that I could see what their gearing was means that I could see the right side of their bike (meaning that they were to the left of me, meaning that they were passing me). There's meaning in there somewhere, I'm sure of it. Regardless, when I back out the calculation of a 39x23 being 143 gear-inches, at 7mph on the up-sections, it would appear that I was climbing with a cadence of about 50 rpm. Not so good in the long term leg health, but my knees have felt fine during and ever since. Lucky, I guess.

But more importantly, it was pretty. Fun and pretty. Sure, slogging up the mountain is work. But when you turn around and tuck in and blast down the mountain faster than you've ever been, you very easily forget about the previous 2 hours of slow climbing that it took to get there. The views were amazing. The instant camaraderie with 3000 other people was unexpected, but in a day of shared suffering and exhilaration, a rather nice thing.

A couple days after getting back from the ride, someone asked me "so.. would you do it again? Maybe not next year, but some other time?" My free-association response: "I'd do it again next month if it wasn't so damn far away. Where do I sign up?"