Sunday, August 12, 2007

ULCER 2007

I rode my second ULCER (Utah Lake Century Epic Ride) on Saturday August 11th. The course started and ended at Thanksgiving Point and rode 111 miles around Utah Lake... although I managed to squeeze in an extra 6 miles by getting off course near Spanish Fork canyon. I completed the ride with a moving average of 21 miles per hour. That's a pretty good speed for me but it probably would have been better if it wasn't for some trouble that I had along the way.

This is essentially a slightly longer version of the weekly ride that I do on Thursday mornings. On Thursdays, I do the same loop traveling in the opposite direction but only end with about 89 miles as we don't start at Thanksgiving Point and we don't detour all the way out to Springville.

I was hoping to ride ULCER with the same group that I do my weekly ride with, but they all either had prior commitments or they weren't interested in doing an organized ride that they already ride so frequently for free. I could see their point, but there is just something special about the ULCER being in our "neighborhood" and it's kind of neat to ride in a group of 2000 cyclists that share your passion for riding.

So, I had originally thought that I was going to be riding the ULCER solo, but then I got hooked up with some friends of DanB that were riding as a team. This was MikeB, his son, Ben, Bob and a guy whose name I never got despite riding with for most of the day. We'll refer to him as WhiteJerseyGuy or WJG for short. I had briefly met MikeB and his son Ben at RANATAD but all of the other faces were new.

Riding as a team we actually got to start a little earlier than the general crowd. The teams were released in stages starting at 7AM. We got off by about 7:15. Despite Mike claiming that we were going to start "slow and easy to warm up", we ended up peeling away from the starting line and holding a pace of better than 25 miles per hour. We probably couldn't have maintained this pace on our own, but we were riding on the wheels of a larger group of teams that was doing most of the work. We just got the free ride :)

About 15 miles into the ride, the larger group started to split into several smaller ones. Somehow we ended up in a slightly slower group doing 22 miles per hour. After a couple of miles at this pace, I looked over at my teammate and asked, "Wanna close the gap on the larger group?". "Yeah", he said, "I was thinking about that too. Lead the way." And so I did.

It looked like I had to sprint for a quarter mile to catch up to the larger pack. But after going all out and finally catching the group in front of us, it turned out that they weren't the larger, faster group. They were just another slow group that had been dropped by the fast group. So, I rested for a second and then sprinted for another quarter mile to catch the next group. This happened 3 or 4 times until we finally caught a group that was moving at a nice pace. What looked like an easy quarter mile sprint ended up being an exhausting 2 or 3 mile sprint to catch up with this group. I took the next several miles easy to catch my breath.

By the time that we reached the first rest stop in Springville 30 some odd miles into the ride, we were riding a staggering average of 23 miles per hour. That's fast. At least for me that's fast. I was feeling good, but starting to fear that I couldn't hold that pace for the full 111 miles. We actually rode right on past the first rest stop. The guys that I was riding with really wanted to put in a good time, and so they planned on doing the full loop with only a single stop at the 70 mile mark.

At this point in the ride, we had already lost MikeB and Bob back in Pleasant Grove somewhere. So, it was just Ben, WhiteJerseyGuy and myself heading out from Springville into Spanish Fork. We were still riding on the wheels of another team as we left Springville and starting climbing the hill in Mapleton up Hwy 89. As we got further and further and down this road I begun to wonder when the course was going to turn off towards the lake. This didn't feel right.

To make things worse, we were riding into gale force winds of Spanish Fork Canyon. This couldn't be the right route. No one would be sadistic enough to plan a ride into this kind of a canyon wind. But I just kept following the guy in front of me who was following the guy in front of him. I assumed that someone at the front the of pack knew where we were going. It wasn't until we reached the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon that the entire group collectively realized that we were lost.

We rode fast back down Hwy 6 into Spanish Fork. I knew how to get back on course, but I couldn't convince anyone else to come with me except for WhiteJerseyGuy. So, we split off from the larger group and I took backroads through my hometown to get us back on course. Ben had disappeared into one of the other groups and we wouldn't see him for the rest of the day. I kind of wonder how long it took those other groups to get back on track. It really pissed me to not only lose 6 miles worth of course time, but to have to ride those into a grueling canyon wind. You really don't need that kind of extra work when you are already riding a 111 mile course.

The ride from Spanish Fork to the front side of the lake was smooth. WJG and I got back into a fast moving pack and cruised through the country side out to the lake. I even got the opportunity to pull (ride in front and let the group draft off of me) a couple of times. Things didn't get ugly until we hit the Southwest corner of West Mountain. It's there that we hit a ridiculously strong headwind and a small patch of climbing that knocks the gusto out of you.

The climbing wasn't very difficult by Nebo standards but it just hits you in a way that demoralizing after riding so fast. Coupled with the heat of the rising sun and a water bottle that was beginning to run dry, this section was kind of miserable. The group quickly scattered into individual riders slogging along at their own pace. For the first time in the day, WJG pulled ahead of me and I ended up riding semi-solo for a couple of miles.

There was a water stop just before we picked up highway 6 in Goshen. And it was well placed considering that my water bottles had completely dried up a mile earlier. Even though it was only another 5 miles to our planned lunch stop, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to refill my bottles, empty my bladder and stretch my legs for a couple of minutes.

We were still fighting a stiff head/cross wind on the road to Goshen. But somehow it was made easier knowing that we had such a short distance to cover and that we were going to stop for lunch once we got there. The time went quickly.

At the lunch stop we reunited with MikeB and Bob. Apparently, our little detour through Spanish Fork canyon had given them plenty of time to catch up with us. They pulled into the rest stop just a little after we did. MikeB was still full of vim and vigor but Bob looked a little worse for the wear. We grabbed a couple of bites to eat and then jumped right back out on the road.

I led the group heading out of Goshen. We only had about 5 miles to Elberta where we would turn behind the lake and turn that grueling cross/headwind into a glorious tailwind. I pushed hard to fight the wind on that stretch of road but I was still concerned that I was going too slow for my teammates... so I would push a little harder. A couple of miles down the road, I decided to pull out and let someone else pull when I realized that there was no longer any of my teammates behind me. I had apparently dropped all of them. I hadn't realized it because some other guy had gotten on my wheel making me think that they were still behind me.

I rode solo up to the Elberta turn-off and then waited a couple of minutes in the shade for the rest of the group to catch up. At this point, I wasn't all that concerned about my individual time, I just wanted to have a good, fun ride back to Thanksgiving Point. MikeB and WJG came tooling along in a couple of minutes but Bob was nowhere to be seen. I got back on their wheels and we rode a blazing fast pace with a beautiful tailwind behind us.

When it comes to favorable riding conditions such as tail winds and downhill sections, there are two types of riders: Those who use the easy riding as an opportunity to rest for a while and enjoy the ride and those who use the conditions as mechanism to bolster their average speed. I can be either type of rider depending on the scenario, but with 75+ miles behind me already on this ride, I was leaning more towards cruising for a few miles to recuperate from that ugly headwind.

The group that we were pacing however, saw things differently. They decided that tailwind was the perfect reason to pick the speed up to over 30 miles an hour. That was actually easier than it sounds given the wind and stretch of road that we were riding. But nonetheless, we held that pace for about 5 miles before MikeB decided that he'd had enough and wanted to drop back to a more comfortable pace. I wasn't about to argue with him. A more comfortable pace sounded pretty good to me.

So, we slowed it back down to about 25 or 26 miles per hour and "relaxed" :) We had been cruising along at this pace for a couple of minutes when all of the sudden I heard a loud popping noise. It kind of startled me. At first I thought that I had blown one of my tires. Had my Kevlar failed me? No, my tires seemed to be holding pressure although something didn't look quite right about my front wheel. I pulled over to take a closer look and discovered that I had popped one of my spokes. That popping sound was the sound of my spoke breaking. I'm not entirely sure what caused it. I might have run over something or it could just be a freak accident.

The broken spoke had caused my wheel to become untrue. It was crooked enough that as it spun an entire revolution it rubbed up against both the left and right brake pads. On top of slowing me down, this made it so that the front wheel was kind of wobbly as it spun around. It probably wasn't that big of a deal but after the accident that I had just survived a week ago, a wobbly wheel at 25 miles per hour sounded a little intimidating.

MikeB stuck with me until the next rest stop where I was planning to get a SAG vehicle to bring a mechanic to look at my wheel. We dropped the pace down a couple of miles an hour just to be safe. As if the difference between 25 miles per hour and 23 miles per hour was going to matter if my wheel failed and I came crashing down into the asphalt.

The next "rest stop" was basically a tent setup in the middle of nowhere with a volunteer passing out ice and water. It was a minor stop that most riders didn't even bother to stop at. But at least the guy had a radio and he started to track down a mechanic for me. I probably waited for 15 minutes before being informed that it would be a while before they could get anyone out to me. But, there was a mechanic from Bingham cycle setup at the next rest stop just 12 miles down the road.

They offered to SAG me up to it. I appreciated the offer, but there was no way that I was going to be SAG'ed for any portion of this ride. I saddled up and decided to ride slow and easy to the next stop. 12 miles really wasn't that far. It went quickly with that nice tailwind and a few good tunes on my iPod.

The mechanic took one look at my wheel and basically told me I was screwed. He didn't have any spare spokes and even if he had normal ones, he wouldn't have any of the special spokes that my wheel takes. See I have these fancy wheels with flat aerodynamic spokes rather than the normal round ones. Basically, my only option was to open up my brakes so that the wheel didn't rub as it spun around and to ride the last 20 some odd miles on a wobbly wheel. "Why not?" I thought to myself. If I could ride 15 miles on a wobbly wheel then I can ride another 20. No problem.

Just as I had resigned myself to this option, the mechanic says, "Or... I could just let you take the wheel of my bike here". Hanging right behind him was his personal road bike. I'm not quite sure why he had it with him considering that he wasn't riding, but it just so happened to have the exact same set of wheels that I had on my bike. It wouldn't have mattered if they weren't the same set of wheels, but I thought it a strange coincidence that they just happened to be the same set of wheels. It was an offer that was too good to refuse. I took the wheels and got back on the road without even partaking of the food or water at the rest stop.

The 20 miles back to the finish line actually went pretty quickly. With my confidence in my wheels restored I was able to pick up the speed a little (actually a lot) and pass up a bunch of the people that had passed me up when I had been riding slower on bum wheels. There wasn't a whole lot of drafting to be had. I was mostly riding solo or picking up small groups here and there. The groups never seemed to last for very long though.

Coming through Saratoga Springs I actually met up with Bob again. Apparently the fiddling that I had done with my wheels had given him the opportunity to get back in front of me. I slowed for a minute to talk to him and even briefly considered sticking with him for the remainder of the ride. But he seemed to be really bogged down and after finally getting a good set of wheels back I just didn't feel like holding myself back anymore.

I pulled into the finish line 6 hours and five minutes after leaving earlier that morning. That included roughly 35 minutes of non-moving time for a moving time of 5 hours and 30 minutes with an average speed of 21 miles per hour.


Here is the elevation profile for the ride. It actually looks more jagged than some of the other profiles that I've posted but that's because there was much less overall elevation change which means you see more detail in the rolling ups and downs.

1 comment:

Go for It ! said...

Glad you came through it safe and sound !