After slamming in rides totaling over 500 miles and 62,000 feet of climbing since the rains started to let up in May, Caroline and I made a reconnaissance trip to Markleeville a week before the Death Ride. The idea was to get a look at the passes beforehand and test our fitness at altitude. For those of you who enjoy data—things like how many miles we rode, how many vertical feet we climbed, and what kinds of temperatures we faced during the rides, the links below will show you the readouts from my bike computer. It turned out to be a bit of a surreal weekend, as our friend Bill, with whom we had planned to ride, had a strange incident at his rented house, where some vagrant apparently wandered in, started fixing him/herself a meal, then snatched Bill’s truck keys and ran out the back as Bill was riding up from his first ride of the weekend. This changed up our riding routine a little, but the bottom line was that we faced nasty winds we will not have to face this Saturday, and we fell short of our goal of riding the first 4 DR passes in one go. Not a concern, though, as we had rented a house for the full week prior to the DR, so we figured we could do that the following week. We rode all 3 days we were there, but because of Bill’s mishap, the last ride was the only one the three of us were able to do together.
6/24/2011 – Death Ride Reconnaissance I - Monitor Pass
6/25/2011 – Death Ride Reconnaissance II - Ebbet's Pass
6/26/2011 – Death Ride Reconnaissance III - West Monitor
No comments:
Post a Comment