Naked Mountain...

The coaches decided to go for the "Naked Mountain" ride out of Gainesville, VA described as "more challenging, but you're all able to do this ride", from what the alums said, Naked mountain was about in the middle of the ride, and a really hard climb. The start was about 45 minutes from home for me. I was apprehensive before the ride (as usual) but motivated myself be thinking about people going through chemo and how they must feel waking up to that prospect.

Here, I'm going over the cue sheet before the ride. The forecast was 20-30% chance of thunderstorms and a little windy. Not terribly exciting for riding weather, but that's 70-80% chance of no-rain, right? Most people didn't take a rain jacket, since the window for the storm was short, and the weather was pretty warm.

We rode into dark clouds, very storm like, within the first few miles. Anyway, about 5 miles in, it started to rain. And then rain pretty heavily, big fat drops. I thoughts about taking off my sunglasses to see, but my teammate was in front of me and water kept splashing my face. I thought, if this last an hour I’m OUT! Well, after about 15 minutes, we rode out of it, which was AWESOME!. At that point, however, the wind picked up :) Who pissed off Mother Nature? Seriously! Headwind for 65-miles!

One of my more experienced teammates commented as we were getting ready to ride out that the 72.5 mile ride was really more like an 85 mile ride because of Naked Mountain in the middle. Since 72.5 already seemed like an awful lot of miles (10 more than last week) I tried not thinking about the bigger number. When the wind started up, I just had to laugh, because after hills, nothing makes a ride harder than riding into a headwind (except for perhaps temperature). The first SAG stop was at 26.2 miles, I had been feeling EXTREMELY sore for the first 20 or so - from an earlier workout. I convinced my fellow teammate, Phyllis that we were going to go easy at the start of the ride and pace ourselves, since no matter how great our starts were, the ends were always a grinding slog. She was a trooper and we managed to help each other throughout the ride.

The wind took it out of me a bit, so I rolled into the first stop, had a bunch of food and filled up my water bottles. The alums and team pointed out that that the next stage of the ride was the most difficult by far, and to pace ourselves. I like to be told the truth, NO BS…I need to prepare myself. They tried to describe Naked Mountain, the steepness of the top part (last 100 yards), but when they said "there's no shame in walking" that really kind of made the point.

OK, Naked Mountain is a stern climb, and the top gets really steep. The particularly hard part (much like Sugarloaf) is that you climb gradually all the way to the start of the mountain, so once you get there, your already kind of worn out. I started to climb. I got into a good rhythm, and started feeling like I was going to conquer the mountain! I saw my teammate(s) up ahead get off their bikes as we got to the steep top part of the mountain, I stayed on the bike...kept riding...and just kind of hit a wall as it got steep. At which point, I walked. Phyllis & I were huffing and puffing, calves burning. My HR Monitor was reading at 228!!! At the top, our honored teammate's father was a SAG volunteer for the ride, and was waiting at the top of the mountain to congratulate us and refill our water bottles.

He told us that that this was pretty much the hardest ride he had done when he was part of the team, and one of the all-time hard climbs. And then he said what everyone else kept saying - after the training rides, the Tahoe ride will be great. So that was about mile 46 out of 72.5. Still some miles left to go. They were hilly, they were rolling, and they had some sweeping downhill (clocked at 30MPH)…really cool and exhilarating feeling. Along the way the san was warming my back and coating my farm tan; then I saw a large black SNAKE on the highway sunning itself – FREAKED me out! Good thing I was on a bike that helped me kick up my speed.

At the last SAG stop mile 58.3 they had Oreo cookies…I was totally craving sugar at this time I burned about 2900 calories…I ATE 2…I didn’t feel guilty at all…in fact one of the Alum said I was probably burning it off as I chewed it up – AWESOME!! I look at the que sheet – mire 15 miles left! Another teammate (Kirk - he’s done this ride 6 times) who I’ve trained with mid-week; we started to pick up the pace. I shouted back to him, “let me know when we hit mile 67, I want to shout for cheer…never gone past 67…”, he said, “well we are at 69…”. I started getting ROCKY amped. I realized I only have 4 miles to go. He started talking about mile stones; the time he hit 5,000 and then 6,000.

About 2.5 miles from the end, we wait for my mate Phyllis. We cruised into the parking lot on sheer adrenaline. It was incredible. By then I though…I CAN totally do 100! She and I were just yelling all the way into the parking lot. I was incredibly glad to be done. It took 6 hours and twenty minutes. The lead group finished in about 4:45, the last people rolled in at least 55 minutes after I got back. Happy to be in the middle, happy it was a good ride, happy to have it behind me.

In the car on the way home, I heard all these weather advisories - high wind! NO KIDDING, I could have told anyone that…weathermen are geniuses. What a day! GO team!