After a long winter of prep, our FirstEnergy Road Rockets are ready. We've raised the 2nd most funding after bohemoth Enbridge, and 3 of our Road Rockets are in the top 10 donor collections overall (boxes to the right). Not only are 3 in the top 10, our team also contains this year's largest individual donor! That's a great way to start the ride, and more important than drinking beer at the tent site on Saturday night.
I had a co-worker drive my bag out on Saturday morning so I could ride from home to tack on another hour to get to Spruce Meadows. Checkin was fairly uneventful and well run, and the weather looked good. Our team had a couple of cancer survivors, and Jenn's speech at the start was a keynote. Mom had cancer with 3 kids and died young, uncle had it, grandma, and I forget who else. Long list though. And she's had a bunch. Can't unfortunately do the ride with us after a strong 5 day a week Calgary to Cochrane job bike commuter-vegetarian-non-smoker-only a beer a day type is whittled down in health over years of recurring bouts and spreading to way too many parts of the body and having an ongoing diagnosis of even if it remisses it's just a matter of time till it comes up somewhere else. Really sad, but of course even if she was sad we'd never know. People do amazing jobs of being resilience in the face of more lightning strikes than anyone deserves.
We started out with 2,200 other participants towards the Chain Lakes campground, whom in total raised $8.7 million. That's a lot of dough. Pace was easy off the bat, it's not a race anyway so we just chit chatted. I gave my raincoat to a team mate who only had a jersey which ended up "saving their day" in their words.
The first few rollers sort things out, and even if you're going conversational, the group just divides up naturally. We had a good paceline going by Okotoks, and dropped in for a quick pee break. The support on the ride from the volunteers is fantastic in terms of food, snacks, mechanical help, and coffee. There's a lot of people out who need mechanical help - this even is participatory and doesn't draw "cyclists" per se.
After Okotoks, more hills and headwind did sorting, and John Chambers, Brian Dunn and I ended up riding for hours together. My guts got into that "not processing fluid" situation I get sometimes, so about 80k in I dropped off them. They rode into the finish with the guy who's a researcher and 2x survivor who makes it in first each year - I was a few minutes back after the headwinds slowed my solo progress down. Great day to be out though. Chambers and I then went for a ride towards Nanton to top up the mileage, so when all was said and done it was a hundred miles for me in 10 minutes less than 6 hours. Even with that, the bike racks were sparsely populated when we came in the second time.
Brian decided not to ride extra with us, but he had the first beer poured of the entire event. It led to about 10 more for all of us, watching our team, the Kern team, other friends, etc. come in for hours. Walking through tent village was La Ruta-esque - people just clobbered themselves to finish this thing. Medical tent lined up, people sprawled on the grass, hobbling, etc. I guess biking a lot sorta makes me numb to the reality that pedalling a hundred kilometers is big for the population average fitness level. We watched Ryan Leech do some trails which is always super cool to see up close - seeing world class from 8' away is always worth it. We continued the tall tales and gong show as long as we could with the band being pretty good - but they ran out of beer (we even had cases upon cases of our own delivered). Off to bed. But not in my tent, someone took that. Odd for a charity event I thought, chatted to the lady briefly. When they have a letter and number on them, and that letter and number is not the one they emailed you in advance, you probably shouldn't put your stuff in it.
I took only a light bag and had to wear all my clothes to sleep decently, but managed fine. Woke up to rain, and tried to get breakfast. They sort of ran out of food, and there were hundreds behind me. I was in one line that "closed", then shuffled to the next one, and after 10 minutes they closed too. Probably not a good way to do it (and the beer which was charged for) considering the "customers" each bring a minimum of $2,500 of donations (and most much more). For the sake of the charity at a minimum, these people bring invaluable (and huge) funding, and I'm sure even having one extra guy there for $2,500 bucks would have offset another pancake load or whatever. No biggie really, I had a boost, a banana, and pack of instant oatmeal with cold water.
I loaned out extra caps, armwarmers, windbreaker, etc. this morning as we were in a steady rain and a headwind off the start - and it didn't truly ease up all day. Start time was 7, but it seemed like people were going out well before. I mounted at 7:02, and hadn't seen Chambers and Dunn, and asked the rest of the FirstEnergy team, but no luck. From seeing Brian up earlier, I thought they'd be off, so off I went. The first climb was packed 6 wide with hundreds of people, none of whom were finding it appropriate for big ring. It's weird seeing that many people out, but fun. Was going by hundreds of people, and met Cee, a chinese girl who latched onto me at some point. I shoulder checked again 10 minutes later, and considering I was doing about 300W for that time period, was surprised she was still there. I eased up to chat, and she said she should have trained more this year and only had ridden a couple times. It got to "if it interested you, you might want to try a race" as there's a pretty impressive engine in there for a girl who's essentially first ride was this thing last year. After a few more hills, she dropped off, I coasted, then Brian and John showed up - but from behind.
We were off to the races so to speak, as traffic dwindled now, weather was foul, and headwinds were fierce. Remaining 70km were 3 man paceline, and somehow we ended up at the finish first (had to wait for first batch of awesome great big beef burgers to be finished). One lady asked us if we started at 4am... funny. I'm not entirely sure she believed us when we said "like just a couple minutes after 7". 3:29 - so a good two days of pedalling hard which I was hoping for.
Good setup at the end, would have been nice to stay and chat, but with rain, being soaked, and overall getting chilly, booking it out of there seemed wise (plus I got a ride in an ML with twice the power of mine - the AMG one).
Good weekend all in. Tough tough riding for newbies who were getting drenched and blown around by headwinds on Sunday. Good fundraiser, lots of fun times and stories, and good talking to those who are going/have gone through way crappier times in life than a couple hours in the rain. And like a bunch of girls had on their t-shirts: f**k cancer.
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