A Day of Climbing

Yesterday I took off work so I could do my last 3 days in a row of long rides. Not only did I plan to ride long but also to do a lot of climbing to see how I felt when I was already tired. The first 1.5 hours has really tough and I was having my doubts on the climb up to Woodland Park. It just seemed like my legs were dead and had no power. They weren’t sore but I just couldn’t get them to work. I had 3 friends meeting me in Woodland Park or I likely would have turned around and done something flatter. A little ways before Woodland Park, my legs started feeling good.

I met my friends in Woodland Park and we had a nice spin to Deckers. Just after Deckers there is a 4 mile climb at 8% grade. I felt good and pushed pretty hard up the climb. Tom and Bruce went off the back about right away but Rich hung on for a while and never dropped out of sight. Our 50+ mph descent into Buffalo was interrupted by road construction. We then do the pretty ride along the river to Pine. Rich needed to get back so we didn’t do the 6 mile climb up to Pine Junction and headed back.

I continued to feel good on the way back and rode a good pace on the climbs. I got a little extra climbing in by dropping down to the other guys at the tops of the climbs. The other guys were suffering the last 15 miles in Woodland Park. I pulled into a fairly strong headwind but still had to be careful to keep from dropping them.

Since we hadn’t done the climb to Pine Junction, I was going to ride up to Divide. They clouds were getting dark and the temperature dropping so I thought it was probably better for me to drop to lower elevation. Since I was going to be descending for 15 miles, I decided to get a burger at Wendy’s. When I came back out, it was just starting to sprinkle. By the time I got to the other end of Woodland Park where Team Telecycle is, it was beginning to downpour. I stopped at Team Telecycle and Paul said a severe storm warning had just been issued and he thought I should keep going or I might get stuck there. I really didn’t that was a good idea because I was afraid I’d get hypothermic. Even in the middle of the summer, rain at 8400 feet is cold and this time of year it’s really cold. In fact, Pikes Peak got a several inches of snow out of the storm and there was fresh white down below timberline this morning. Fortunately my coach, Sharon, was there picking up rental bikes for some clients coming in this week and she had room to throw my bike in and give me a ride down into town.

I was thinking maybe I could get in some more riding down low and it was only sprinkling where Sharon dropped me off. To the south and east the clouds were very ugly with lots of lightening but along the foothills it didn’t look too bad. I decided to ride toward my house and see what happened. When I got close to my house, it started raining and didn’t look good so I stopped. It turned out it didn’t do much more than get the street wet until quite a bit later. Fortunately I wasn’t riding out east because they got 100 mph winds that tore some buildings apart and closed the road I was riding on the day before.

I had planned on doing 150 miles which would have gotten me 500 miles for the 3 days but instead I only got in 115 miles. It really was equivalent to more since I had gotten a ride down 2300 vertical feet. I got in 10,069 feet of climbing with an average speed of only 13.9 mph but that was affected by not riding down from Woodland Park.

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