Ambition Runs Amok
Ever think to yourself… I think I could do that? Sure it’d be hard, maybe harder than anything I’ve done in the last couple weeks, but I should be able to survive. Well that is how my thought process went when planning this ride.
I drafted Dave (a really strong guy from church) to go with me. We started riding from my house on Sunday (the day after our little 50 miler out south of town) and rode down to Bogus Basin road on our MTBs. From there we headed up to Corals and then onto Hard Guy. This is a serious grunt of a climb in the best of conditions. The 100 degree heat made it a touch harder than I remembered. All of my road riding was helping me quite a bit, but Dave hadn’t put in near enough time on his bike this summer. We got up to Ridge Road (2,000 feet of relentless climbing) and took a longer break. He called his wife and said he was very tired and worn down. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we were only half done with the climbing.
Ridge Road has lots of ups and downs, but mainly ups. We kept riding and dragging our bikes higher and higher… The heat was hitting us both pretty hard; I wasn’t able to keep drinking enough and was getting dizzy and nauseous. This led to very slow progress which may or may not have been worse than just grunting it out and getting it down. After a few more hours we finally reached Deer point (> 4,000 feet of altitude gain). I have no idea what the total assent was as there were many ups and downs on the way up. I had originally wanted to go to Shafer Butte which is another 500 feet of climbing and a couple more miles. Neither of was really feeling like doing much more at this point so we headed out around Little Deer Pointe and down Bogus Basin Road. We got back to my house about 3 hours later.
Total distance: a little less than 60 miles.
Total time out on the bikes: >9 hours.
Total water consumed by me: 165oz
Total Gatorade consumed by me: 72oz
Total weight of liquid consumed by me: ~15 pounds, that is 1.8 gallons.
And in the end I still lost 5 pounds.
When we got back, Dave sprawled out on the floor while his wife helped him sip some iced Gatorade. Rumor is he was back to life in a couple of hours (and probably gallons of liquid) later. I can’t imagine doing that ride without the training I’ve put myself through – hears to Dave!.
Anybody wanna go for a bike ride?