The first climb of 5k had me thinking about health. Mike has strong legs as we all know from our hammer rides. But it's hard when oxygen isn't delivered. It sounded like someone was strangling him on the first climb, so he latched onto my jersey. We tried to hold pace with the top 20, but faded a bit. The thought did cross my mind that I was spending a lot of energy on the first 20 minutes of what I thought would be a 6 hour stage, but I figured I'd cross that bridge when I got to it. If Mckee can suffer, I can suffer too.
Made great time on the singletrack and gravel road descent where Mckee can big ring it without taxing the lungs quite as much. It made me so happy to see him hammering away like that, that's the kind of riding he came to do.
On the back 40k of gravel road, we ended up in a group of 7, including my Team Tamarack Idaho buddies, Nikki Cassels, and the Norwegian team that's winning either the 80+ or 100+. John from Team Tamarack and I split all the pulling until we hit the climb. It was dusty, thankless work, and most of the time we couldn't really pull hard so we just talked (Mckee is other strongest of group, but can't breathe, Team Tamarack guy number two also has asthma, the Norwegians are so far ahead of the next place in their category they didn't seem to care, and Nikki is smart enough to hang in then ride the climb hard).
Mike set a good pace on the climb, but when we got to steep hike a bike, the sheer aerobic demand of it was more than what the lungs were delivering. I felt good so took both bikes, then just cause I was feeling good, decided I might was well make it worth the glory points and revved up the climb. In all honesty, it's just cause I get bitter that the 6 people who drafted for the last 90 minutes think they now have legs to outclimb us, so I decided I was going to march right past all of them if it's the last thing I did. Not that they're really trying to be wheelsucks... but I just get these things in my head.
After that episode, I grabbed a Evervit Cheer pack to prop up the energy and tried to follow Mckee on the downhill to checkstop 2, but he schooled me once again. I've heard comments on his propensity to crash, but I'll go out of my way here to put on record that Mike is a screamer on the downhills.
Jon, Craig, Mike, myself, and the Norwegians rode a lot of the gravel descent together, Jon had caught up from an earlier episode of a couple of flats. I saw him earlier as I went by, and thought I heard him yell tube, but Mike came up right behind me as I was slowing down and said he was ok. Either way, in retrospect I really wished I would have stopped. I didn't understand as Jon has a CO2+Tube+tool thing strapped to his seatpost. Anyway, hope ihe doesn't think I'm an ass. But back to the gravel road, we were making fantastic pace, then hit a little bit of doubletrack before the pavement.
Once on pavement, I unceremoniously scarfed down 2 gels, and helped Jon do some pulling. We wound under a bridge, then started climbing, and to our surprise, saw the team that was 1 second ahead of us in the GC ahead. Needless to say, we formed a paceline and started charging. We swallowed them up shortly, and saw that one guy was bonking. We tried to keep the paceline speed high, then ducked into checkstop 3. I ate two more gels and another Cheer Pack, and chugged a bottle of water with all the dignity of a hungry dog. We started the last, longest climb, and 2 minutes in Mike's cleat needed tightening.
One of the 10th place team was ahead, and one was behind, but with the curve of the road I couldn't figure out if it was the strong one ahead dropping his partner, or the strong one behind shuttling food up from the checkpoint. We caught up to him with some good pacing, and a strategic question revealed that he was the stronger one. Perfect. We paced the climb sensibly, and Mike cracked a Red Bull. About 2/3 of the way up, we were climbing strong, and decided together that it'd be wise for me to ride ahead and Mike would catch up on the descent. I felt fresh with all the gels and Red Bull in the system and upped the speed by about 50%, and within 10 minutes of the top, heard noise behind me. I shoulder checked nd saw our arch rivals climbing in a 2 man paceline at a wicked pace... what the heck!
I stopped and waited for Mike. We decided to stick to the same gameplan, but they crested ahead of us. Mike was digging in deep, and on the first section of the descent, we caught them right away, as one is a super fast descender... and the other is really slow. We blew by the slow one, then it didn't matter how fast the other one was. Mike schooled me on the descent again, but we had agreed that I'd do my best to chase back on once we got onto the gravel road. He was hammering away, and I caught up on a gentle downslope. I was familiar with the heartache at the end of this stage as it loops away from town one more time, so I told Mike to eat whatever he had left, fast.
We rolled into the sweet singletrack right behind Wendy Sims and Norm, who are great to follow. Needless to say, Wendy rides singletrack with panache.
I waited for Mike in the gravel pit, he was only 10m behind, but with the big headwind, false hope of finishing once we saw town, and the Giverator being maxed out for the last 5.5 hours. We drafted across the flats and gave'r on the hills. Mike rode the coal descent... mostly. He took a little crash, and the fact that he was covered in sweat from head to toe, left him looking like a coal miner. We hammered into town for all we were worth, then Mike did the suffer lap around the parking lot to get his blood oxygen up to normal levels.
We'll have lots of good pictures to post, Mike was so covered in dust that he epitomizes the giverator at 10.
Jon and Craig finished like 5 minutes ahead of us, in 12th I think. We may have been 15th, not sure.
The girls made it in 9 hours and 50 minutes, 10 minutes inside cutoff (I also heard the organizers were going to ignore cutoff today, if anyone made it this far it's not like they're going to make an issue of it now, that'd just be cruel). We had burgers, mac and cheese, and massage times booked for their arrival, then got their bikes up on stands for some work. They seemed happy as usual.
Haven't seen many of the other goats, but saw Jerry riding by and he looked shattered, didn't even want to talk.
I'm sad that tomorrow is last day!
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