RATS

Ride Around The Santa (ritas).

This is one of the hardest single day rides I know of. I think we all felt it.

Watching the sun rise and set from the seat of a bicycle – among the best ways to spend a day.

The essence of Chad, caught in a single picture.

Maximus, aka the firecracker, provided a good rabbit to chase. I quite reveled in the chase, though it would be my (our?) unraveling hours later.

Chad on the AZT.

Dave’s got purple arm warmers. Both cheap and whimsical, he says.

Dave just before busting his chain. We had a few mechanicals/flats, but things went well considering the size of the group and the demands of the route.

It was a hot day for granny gear climbing. The angle of the sun was set to ‘cook’ as we resorted to hopping from shady spot to shady spot. Somewhere near false summit number four, a bee dive bombed my ear. There was no warning, just electric pain. Not a pleasant place to get stung, I’ll tell you that much.

Underestimating Bull Springs is an easy, but costly, mistake to make. I’ve done it many times, yet still I’ve never learned. It’s one rocky bastard, and everyone confirmed both fatigue in the upper body and desire for smooth surfaces. We skipped on the AZT 300 ‘short cut’, missing out on the Devil’s Cashbox.

We were running out of daylight, but I think this was actually a bad call on my part. We should have hit the visitor center for water –I think it would have been well worth the extra time.

Dave’s in there if you look close. Head over to his blog for a much better photo, taken at the same time, but pointing the other direction.

There’s usually an inverse correlation between suffering and number of photos. But when the sun is setting (or rising) that axiom is temporarily suspended.

That pretty accurately describes the state of the group near the end. My legs felt good and were able to pedal up anything, but the rest of my body couldn’t keep up, no matter what I ate or how long a rest we had taken. The suffering would wax and wane, but there was no escaping it. We were (voluntary) prisoners of the route, our fate long ago decided by geology and hair-brained trail designers.

It was pretty cool to get a group of four people together to successfully complete this loop. Everybody kept a good attitude, and we finished in just under 13 hours. The desire and ability to complete a loop this brutal, without really knowing what you’re getting into, is a great and rare quality. All these guys are OK in my book. Even Chad. (We love Chad. Especially when he squeezes two packets of GU onto a pile of nachos – bonus calories)

A day later, I feel better than expected, minus my ear, which has doubled in size. Hoping it gets better, not worse, over the next 24 hours.