Training Camp

I spent the weekend in St. George, UT with nearly thirty members of the club.  We were packed into two condos up on a hill overlooking southern Utah.  The first night I slept on the floor in the living room.  I had some misgivings about the whole affair, as I was clearly in the vicinity of 20 years my room mates senior.  None of them had any inclination to go to bed early and were involved in a rather silly movie and loud conversation.  I rolled up in my sleeping bag and fell asleep finally, thanks to two melatonin.  I actually slept pretty well on the stack of three sleeping mats I'd laid out on the floor.  As the ride didn't go off until ten o'clock (nine o'clock my time, Las Vegas and Utah are in different time zones), I had plenty of time to get up, head over to the main condo and have a breakfast of oatmeal, toast, and coffee.  There was plenty of food of all imaginable types.  It would have been easy to come back weighing twenty pounds more if I availed myself of everything that was available.  We headed out in temperatures in the mid thirties (1 - 2 C) and mostly calm air.  The route was up and over Utah Mountain, which on the Utah side is about a ten mile climb at a modest 4 - 5% grade, followed by an approximately 13 mile descent straight down the other side into Beaver Dam, Arizona.  We regrouped at the summit and about fifteen riders decided to turn around at Beaver Dam, which would have given them a 74 mile ride.  The rest of us rolled on to Mesquite, nearly ten miles farther, where we stopped for a quick lunch at Subway, and then began the trek back to St. George.  Mesquite sits at approximately 1617' of elevation (493 meters).  The road rolls gradually upward to Beaver Dam, AZ at 1868' (569 meters), which is where the climb back up Utah Mountain begins.  Total elevation gain from here is 2683' (818 m) over the nearly 14 miles with the bulk of it occurring over the last six miles.  Not a staggering climb, but it's long, and the road is straight through the desert, so one can see the road disappearing in the grim far distance.  A few of the Category 1 riders started pulling the group apart, and Dirk Cowley (one of the old guys I'll be racing with, a world class Master's rider) and I were adrift for awhile.  Dirk surged ahead and caught them, while I stopped the following van and pulled my jacket off, as I was beginning to overheat.  Once I was clear of the jacket I felt much better and immediately dropped all the remaining riders, but to no avail:  I was caught out in the middle of no man's land.  I'm not sure how far I was behind the lead group, but I ultimately took out so much time from the remaining riders that when I reached the summit, we went on without them after waiting nearly ten minutes.  A junior , T. J. Eisenhart, took the summit first, with over a minute of free space between him and second.  I caught and passed Ken Louder, who had left Mesquite well ahead of the rest of us, about a mile from the top.  At this point there were seven of us, and we took the twenty miles back to St. George at a good clip.  The descent was fast and winding, and a lot of fun;  once down, we hit a series of rollers on the approach to town.  The further we were into the ride, the better I felt, and I often had to wait at the top of a roller for the rest to catch up.  To be fair to them, many of them had been up there all week and had been hammering day after day prior to that Saturday (not that I'd been on any kind of cycling vacation, mind you, but I hadn't done the long hard miles these guys had subjected themselves to).  We rolled in the parking lot of the condo at 94.4 miles (151 Km) and approximately 7000' of climbing overall (2134 m) .
This ride marks a new bar for me .  This was the longest ride I'd taken since the early 1990s.  The second longest was last summer at approximately 85 miles, and my weekly "long ride" has been in excess of 70 miles since June.  Given my chronic saddle soreness, I wasn't sure if I could sit on the saddle that long.  I was fine with it, and so now the possibility of riding the Everest Challenge is within the realm of more than possibility, it can be a reality.

Sunday was an easy 22 mile spin around the St. George area.