2 weeks to LOTOJA

Excited. Nervous. Beat.

I am quite glad Stan and I spent the last Friday and Saturday on our bikes previewing portions the LOTOJA course. I would say it was invaluable even before actually going through the event itself. Seeing and experiencing the climbs, the rollers, the long stretches of "flat" lands were useful and fun. Oh, and painful. My GPS logged over 8600 feet of climbing. My body felt many miles of headwind. My legs felt pain. We're doing all of this in one day? Holy shit.

But I am still glad I saw it before the event.

There's a chance I can do well at this race. I have two more weeks to prepare, and I believe the preparation will be mental and logistical. The physical preparation is done; if I don't have it by now it's truly too late. It could happen.

Token picture: This is what the finish looks like:

Reflecting on the ULCER

This year's ULCER hosted a team time trial as it did last year. Here's my perception of the race.

We begin this time trial in a bunch start. I suppose this makes it easier, and it is possible there just isn't enough time in an hour to start the number of teams there were signed up. At first I thought this would just turn into a road race instead of a team time trial. It turned out to be a good mix of road racing and time trialing; I'm glad I was wrong.

As usual a group of 50+ people in a small group can cause some scary moments. I heard of a crash not too far behind us, and there was a near crash directly in front of me involving a team member which did a phenomenal job staying upright. The person in front of him swerved and caught his front wheel, he reacted and gained control, we scattered and I believe all stayed rubber-side down. Good stuff.

The rough roads at the beginning of this course don't help either. Plenty of potholes cause plenty of sketchy riding, even though the roads were marked extremely well. At least I didn't lose a water bottle due to road conditions this time, as happened in my last two races. I hear there is a chance the ULCER will go to the west of Utah lake and through Eureka next year; I hope that's the case. I really don't care for the course weaving around the little towns of Lehi, Springville, etc. Too many turns, too much traffic, too many stop lights and signs, and definitely too many road obstacles.

Once we got going as a team - after our 22 mile stop - we did extremely well. We caught the pack nearly at will, did it again at 44 miles, and just worked quite efficiently. Everyone ended up doing a great job, we worked as hard as we possibly could, we put on a killer chase at the very end, and we just barely missed the win in our category by 12 whole seconds. Rogers did a superb job, I mean superb, at chasing for the last section of the course. Turns out we were 3 minutes back from the overall win, that's amazing!

Overall a great day. A little annoying to be that close to the win, but we gave it all. We had great weather and great support!

Tour de Park City: Check too!

I ended up with a 10th place finish which is spectacular for me.

It was a great race team day in my eyes. We worked as small groups throughout the race, helping each other through wind, flats, downhills, and uphills. Our team got amazing results of 5th place, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 17th and 18th in the top 20. I believe everyone in our team that started this race finished - a feat in itself!

I don't know how many times I've said or written this: This was the toughest thing I ever did on a bicycle. The first 100 miles were great, well except for the complete lack of racing etiquette from the Category 5 racer assholes. Any racers out there let me explain neutral zones to you: You back off the tempo until the crowd gets through the feed zone and catches up. Back off you assholes. Let's have a real race. Are you truly afraid of finding out if you have a chance to win if you play fair?

That stupid climb past Mirror Lake was so hard I remember having a tough time just keeping my body upright, holding my hands on the handlebar, being completely out of energy. I mean out. I stopped and laid on the side of the road for a minute or two. That really really really sucked.

But things worked out well after that. 4 of us caught back up at the top of the climb and rode into Kamas together. Great times! Until that evil climb back to Park City...but by that time it was just survival. It was sweeeet to get a 9th place finish out of the deal. Yeah, it was a 9th place when I first showed up. Then some Category 5 racer appeared in the top 9 after I showed up, dropping some of us down one spot. Speaking of race organization...

Well, an optimistic person might say there is some room for improvement with race organization. I think they did ok, could have been worse, but there were some critical problems. Twist-off bottled water that do not fit snugly in bottle cages at the 25 mile stop? 3 or so people to handle all the water at the 50? COMPLETELY OUT OF WATER AT THE 75??? Um, Category 5 racers were the 5th group to start thus 0there were 20 other groups following, where did all the water go? And where the hell are two of my three musette bags? I personally handed my last one back to the person that handed it to me at mile 125. It didn't come back. How can it not come back? It was in the guy's HANDS. I was there. Somewhat delirious, but really I was there.

Ok, the feed bag handout at 100 was awesome! Of course, 100 was actually 106 ish; that's pretty important info to give us. Water handout was good for 2 of the 4 of us at the 150. The other two of us didn't realize there was a water stop coming and didn't have time to grab a bottle. That cost them an extra stop in Kamas cause they didn't have enough water to finish.

Whew. This one is checked off. It was rough. I am quite happy I made it in 9:20 - way under the 10 to 11 hour expectation I had. Now on to LOTOJA for the grand finale.

Mis-quoting a riding buddy: "Dude this was fucking nuts / stupid / crazy. See you next week."