The descent was overgrown, fast and gnarly, I think it wreaked havoc on a lot of teams. We had a blast and made good time. Exiting the descent, we caught up to Jon and Craig again. It was perfect timing, as we had a huge gravel road section, so the 4 of us worked together for it's entirety, including the final climb. It's a huge morale booster to have a 4 person team of friends working together. And by together, I mean Jon pulling with unreal strength and endurance, and the rest of us hanging on in varying degrees of suffer.
We climbed past checkpoint 3 as hard as we could, Mckee put the giverator into overdrive and we reeled in 5 teams and didn't get passed by any. Jon and Craig made it over the top a little ahead, but by the gravel road we were all together again. We pushed the 4 man paceline hard, and entered the singletrack with energy. It's a super fun trail, and Mike and I passed the Swiss team in front of us in no time flat, they were walking some ass-behind-the-saddle downhill that might be considered intermediate, that had a log across the trail at the bottom. My skidding tires alerted them to move over, and I suspect they were at least mildly startled that the log wasn't even much of a speed bump for our 4 man lineup. We got within 20 seconds of the team in front of us with 3k to go, so I asked Mike if he had juice to crank it up and race for one more spot, or if we were better off cruising in where we were. The end result was that we did both, a brief burst of energy to give it a try, then settled in for a finish where we were.
Jon and Craig made it in about 5 minutes later, then just a couple of minutes behind them were Tim and Mike, who had an awesome day.
Ed and Pat came motoring in a few minutes later, then we headed over to the pond, bike wash and massage table. By 2pm I had cleaned up, done bike work, had a massage, eaten 1,500 calories, and settled in for a nap. Burgers were the meal of choice today: Jon packed away 3 for an afternoon snack, while Mike, Craig and I did 2 each, plus a little Spolumbos sausage. I demolished a box of macaroni and cheese with a quarter bottle of A1 steak sauce in about 10 minutes too.
The giggleators came in 7 hours I think, with enough funny stories and poems they had composed to amuse us for the night. If anyone claims that riding a bike for 7 hours at a time can't be fun, they obviously need to consult with Tori and Cindy.
Feeling stronger every day, I wish I could bottle up the feeling forever! There's nothing I like more than endurance cycling and the satisfaction surviving race days brings.
Tomorrow is longer again, but I estimate it'll be about the same time, or maybe a half hour longer. I think it'll be like a road hammer ride that's 5 hours long. We'll do our best to keep in groups, looking at the course, I want to save a lot of gas for the last 45k which is basically all gentle downslope gravel road - my favourite type of time trial...
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