Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Feeling A Little Better

The Tour De Cure is a ride that starts in Murfreesboro, TN and goes up Monteagle Mountain and ends in the town of Monteagle. It is a two day ride of 75 miles each day with camping on Saturday night in Monteagle. It being a charity event to raise money for the cure of Diabetes, one is required to raise a minimum of $150 in order to participate. I had signed up for this ride a good while ago figuring it would fit into my training schedule for the Etape. Also I wanted to ride up Monteagle Mountain because it is higher and steeper than anything around Nashville and it is a good distance climb.

Two days before the ride I started to fund raise to collect the $150 minimum. I sent out several emails from the template website provided and I think people got them Friday morning. I needed to have the money cataloged by Saturday morning so I sent a shameless plea for everyone to donate NOW. Fortunately, my old boss and good friend at work donated $25 and that trend continued and I got a total of 4 $25 donations including one from Robert. Also fortunate is that I work for a generous company (HCA) that makes charity and community service a high priority. My company has matching contribution program and they will kick in $100 so that my total raised is $200.

The weather was perfect again for riding, 65-80 degrees and sunny. I started with the HCA team riders and stayed with a couple of them the whole way. This ride is well supported and has several rest stops. We stopped at most of them and I felt guilty doing that since I am not going to be able to do that in France. I would have preferred to go in, fill my water bottles, grab a banana and be off in 5 minutes or less but I would have been the only one wanting to do that. Anyway, as the HCA team captain said: "There is nothing to do at the camp site, why hurry?" "Well, you see, I have this 117 mile ride and it crosses these gigantic steep.........................and I can't waste time .................must.......average..........L' Alpe D'Huez." "What? You're riding L'Alpe D'Huez?" "Yes, and it's not even the most severe mountain either! I finish up L'Alpe D'Huez!" "Wow, John, you better get some riding in." "Yes, I know." So we took it easy at the rest stops. They fed us sandwiches for lunch and otherwise I ate bananas along with my HammerGel (original formula). All told we spent about an hour off the bike the first day, maybe more but I still felt like I got a decent workout. I worried about Monteagle mountain. By the time we got there I had been told it was 3 miles long and maybe technically it was but the real "mountain steep" section was only 2 miles long. I didn't know that when I started and quickly got into a rhythm I thought I could handle for three miles. I had also been told there was a section that measured a 24% grade. This scared me quite a bit but I was told it was very short. Bottom line, I got up the hill with no problems. Of course I used my triple the whole way but I could have come out of it at times. For that matter, I could have gone up the whole hill in my 39-26 or 39-24 but that would have hurt badly. According to my calculations, the 2 mile steep part averaged an 8.5% grade. That should be about like L'Alpe D'Huez; however, after 110 brutal miles I am not sure any comparison is valid. Or maybe it is. Yep, it took me 17 minutes to cover two miles and that means I will float up the 13.9km of L'Alpe D'Huez in 1:14. And that's if I pace myself and go slow to conserve energy. Get out of my way you people who walk on that hill. How do you say "Move over" in French. The first day to Monteagle was 76 miles.

The next day coming back was fun. We got to do the long descent down the mountain and then hooked up with a group going at a pretty good clip. We got into a group with a tandem riding like a freight train at the front. That went on for about 40-50 miles and kept our average speed up. Eventually the freight train ran out of coal, though, and a few of us struck out on our own. In the end it was just me and Bryan Graves riding into the finish after doing some hard efforts in the last 8 miles. I felt really good at the end. We averaged 19.2 mph for 81 miles.

Lessons learned:

1. Eat more than I am used to. Because we stopped at several rest stops I ate more than I usually do, lots of bananas. I have to think that contributed to my strong ride on both days.
2. Get in a pace group I can live with. I don't need to go out too fast. All of this riding alone made me forget how my average speed should benefit from the drafting.
3. Be careful riding in the group. I can't let fatigue make me lazy about paying attention to other riders. Three people in the Tour De Cure had bad wrecks and at least one of them broke his collar bone only because the two people in front of him touched wheels and he ran into that crash.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home