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."