After yesterday, I stopped calling our fearless leader Trev and started using T-pain. Today is T-pain's 40th birthday, so he wanted something special. Plus we were able to start earlier in the day.
The plan was to do a large local climb called Anarchist. It's 17k and sounded like quite a workout. Ok cool. But since good things come in twos, the idea was to do it twice. Ok great, that's a lot of climbing km's, but T-pain said its not as steep of a grade so we can survive it with our already deadened legs. Ok. So where's the climb? Oh, like 70k away. Geez. So we go to a gourmet breakfast spot and start the ride south to Osoyoos.
We take it reasonably easy on the commute south, passing a winery my colleagues own, then load up on drinks at a gas station.
Nice roads.
Good company.
I went under a local water decoration by the lake before the first climb, it felt good but was dry in like 10 mins. First climb was ok. Hot. Trev passed me again like I was standing still, I got to within a few m of Dennis, but past the 2/3 mark he held a pace that kept me slipping back. The top that people use is not the cougar, stag, deer or eagle, but the Sasquatch. I lied down in some shade and waited for Scott for the descent.
Climb 2 was hotter. It started around 2pm and was already over 100k into the day. I put it in my easy gear and tried to use the Watts left over after cooling to grind my way up.
The temp kept climbing. I felt obligated to take a photo of my Garmin when the temperature matched my age. That's balls hot. I was actually happy that instead of finding shade to sit in that I could continue in modest form.
Coming back down the descent felt like coasting in an oven. If I left my mouth open its go dry right away. We stopped in town at Tim Hortons for snacks. Apparently I needed salt.
Tried to set a pace line into the headwind on the way home but some of us were cracking intermittently. Trev pulled us over onto a path along a canal with less wind and some shade. We couldn't resist the opportunity to cool our core temperatures down a bit.
It wasn't a blazing finish, but one more gas station stop with a can of V8 that went down in 15s helped is finish off. 206k, 2,600m climbing, 8h ride time.
We loaded up at Salty's restaurant, appropriately, for Trev's birthday!
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