Yeti on a bike! I saw this dude on my Decent into Shoshone made me smile for at least an hour!
The Death Valley Double Century was really… really rough, head winds both ways! I can’t even give you an estimated speed on the winds. Lets just say its took a pack of riders 6 hours to get to the 50 mile point. The deafening howl of the winds really made my mind go into dark places. It wasn’t really hard on the way over the two passes(Jubilee and Salsbury) to Shoshone. Pn the way back was the soul crusher. The whole time you were riding into the wind one thought was very prominent in your mind: ‘Will this head wind stay on course for the rest of the day for a great tail wind break… or will it flip for a head wind on the way back’. So on the climb back out of Shoshone you had a nice head wind on the climb and on the decent into Death Valley. When you turned towards Furnace Creek Ranch it was a full on wind tunnel. So i rode in a little pack that grew as we pressed on towards the Badwater stop, which was closing just about when we came down Jubilee pass(thats how far behind everybody was) From then on my mind wondered into total self loathing stage. I was pretty tired from the month of LONG rides the week before Matt and I rode a 300k brevet in San Diego that was pretty miserable with rain, he wrote about it on his blog here:
http://truelovehealth.com/2011/03/01/sometimes-the-lessons-fall-from-the-sky-the-corona-300k/
As we reached closer and closer to Badwater we lost alot of people to Sag vehicles it seemed more and more likely that they were going to cut off us at Furnace Creek Ranch due to time restraints. So I jumped onto the Adobo Velo pace line that caught up with us. They were going a good clip and i wanted to get to Badwater as fast as possible to stop. As we pulled into Badwater I was greeted by Gen with a kiss and her asking” So your done right?” As she passed me a Coke. So i agreed and took the ride from them as they closed up the ‘lunch spot’ . I felt kinda defeated, I really wanted to do 3 doubles in one month because everybody was wearing there Triple Crown jerseys about doing three doubles in a year. Granted they are alot harder than the rides I was doing but seemed like something cool in my weird brain. Well February was defiantly a long and busy month, I’m pretty tired and need to do some intervals I guess… but need the motivation!!
