July 4, 2008

  • Rock Cut ride

    Som Jamie suggested that we do a ride up Fall River Road from Fort Collins.  He is training for the Triple Bypass and needed to get in some miles.  The usual suspects,  Ron and Dave were busy doing their own epics and so it looks like it will be a small crew.

    There is no friggin way I am going to ride from Fort Collins up Trail ridge.  That's officially what I like to call crazy talk.  Even when I was training for Leadville I wouldn't do that!   A more reasonable ride would be from the Dam Store so that's the plan.  That' still pretty crazy for someone not training for anything, but I didn' have anything better to do.

    I meet Jamie at the Dam Store and we take a leisurely stroll up to Estes Park.  Probably one of the easiest I have ever had, but it will be a long day so why suffer for no reason.  Jamie had a hard day Saturday so there were no complaints from anyone.

    We did decide to go up Glenn Haven, and that's about the end of any forced extra suffering!  My legs are tired from walking around the Moto on Saturday,  Running on Friday and the TTH ride on Thursday...

    We make to Estes, get some food at the Bagel shop. We  refuel and head up to  Rocky MTN park.   We get there and seems that now they will allow 2 cyclists to get in on one pass.  Also the ranger stated that 2 people could sign 1 pass!   So I purchase a pass and Jamie rides for free today.

    Once we hit Fall River road, the effort increases about 10 beats per minute for me.  The HR wasn't high, but with tired legs I would have preferred to go slower cause I wanted to be able to make it without cramping.    We keep this pace for a bit then slow down then speed up.  The pace is still pretty slow but that's OK because I am tired. 

    It's not as cold as I would have expected.  Even near the Summit, we didn't find it necessary to add any extra clothing.

    At the Visitors center we  get some expensive food!   Jamie strikes up a conversation with some charity riders from Baltioore riding to Sanfran for Cancer etc.  They are a good sized group all riding Lemonds.  One guy made this camera mount out of an old tail light bracket and I will have to make one of these....

    Once we are fueled we decide to ride up to Rock Cut and take traill ridge down. I was pretty sick of climbing but did it anyway.  

    The descent was nice except the cars were going way slow.  I had to use a lot of break and my front brake shoes wore out and  were now metal on metal.  Jamie didn't mind going slower but I felt I was cheated out of my reward for all that climbing.

    Finally back down to Estes and I was getting pretty cranky and tired.   I think I was like lecturing Jamie on some descending thing and I missed his point entirely.... Anyway,  sorry about that Jamie...  After getting back to Estes and getting more food I was feeling better....

    We decided to go straight down the mountain..  Jamie did  90% of the work cause I didn't want to work.. Yeah, I could have worked, but I just didn't want to make this a training ride and just wanted to enjoy the day.   Anytime  my HR got over 150 I just didn't want to work any harder...

    Finally we make it to the Dam Store and frankly, my legs felt pretty good, and that's a good thing!  I had a max HR of only 166 for the day which is a new low for me on that ride.  Jamie continued on as his legs were still fresh.

    Long day in the saddle.  7+ hours for me.  I didn't think it would take that long, but it did.  Oh well.