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Posts filed under 'Adventure'
Heart of the South 500 – The Details
I summarized the race in my Heart of the South 500 post, but there are many, many details that I left out that I'm going to include in this post. Grab a cup of coffee, your reading glasses, and get ready for an adventure! Long post, so use the links below to jump to a specific section:
- Pre-race
- The Start – Friday, April 4th at 8pm CST
- Flying – miles 0-200 including Lookout Mountain
- Climbing – miles 200-400 including Fort Mountain
- Real Climbing – miles 400-450 including Mount Cheaha
- Sleeping – miles 450-517 including Vandiver
- The Finish – Sunday, April 6th at 3:48am CST
- Equipment Used
- Nutrition and "Drugs"
- Lessons Learned
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I had toyed with the idea of getting up at 2AM so that I would be tired enough Friday afternoon to take a nap before the start of the race at 8PM. After thinking about how much I still had left to do to get ready for the race, I decided I'd be better off getting a full night's sleep and then spend the afternoon packing and double-checking the support vehicle. So at 6AM, I woke up, ate a normal breakfast of oatmeal and then biked my direct route (7.5 miles) into Samford University to teach my two Friday classes. It was raining so I wore my backup shoes. After class, I biked home again on a direct route this time in heavier nastier rain. See instagram pic below, which I captioned: "Clearing to the northwest behind samford, nasty commute home right now though."
Home from university, I worked a bit, answered a few emails, and then started to think about packing. My father-in-law, Dale Cardwell, tested out our light setup and mounted the slow moving vehicle sign on the back of the car. About 2PM, I started throwing all my spare bike equipment into the back of the car. I took my Scott Addict as a backup bike, two extra Martindale wheels, a floor pump, my normal on-the-bike toolkits, and my normal travel tool bag. I also put in a couple extra bib shorts and jerseys. At the last minute I decided to throw in my lighter winter jacket just in case, but I was thinking that temps would stay in the 50s the whole race so I thought leg warmers and arm warmers would be enough. I was really wrong about that as temps plummeted to 32 degF on the descent off Lookout Mountain just before sunrise.
Even though I started packing kinda late, I had been formulating an idea all week of what I would need. See these two instagram pics from earlier in the week:
"Stopped by Brick Alley to pick up my backup bike for Friday." I rode the 3 miles home from the shop carrying the Scott. Then I realized I was running late for picking up the kids from school, so I dropped the bike in the front yard and then took off through the woods to meet and walk home with the kids.
"Love the irony of biking to the auto parts store to pick up all the follow vehicle equipment required for the race."
Nevertheless, I thought everything was on track for our Friday departure until I went to put in all my nutrition. The car was packed with a lot of stuff for Dale and my wife Kristine for 30 hours in the car. I wasn't sure where to put the nutrition so that it was easy for them to grab and hand to me out the window of the car. At this point I had an inkling that this was not going to go quite as smoothly as I had imagined in my head for weeks. I put some gatorade bottles on the front passenger seat floor and a box with powerbars and powergels on the middle row of seats thinking that whoever was in the passenger seat would be able to turn around, grab what I needed, and hand it to me out the passenger window.
From Kristine early in the race – "Pile of maps, pile of charging cords and electronics, pile of food. #necessities Not seen: the pile of clothes and pile of bike equipment #needmorecaffeine #hots500″
My parents were coming over to pick up the kids and keep them for the weekend while Kristine, Dale, and I drove over to the pre-race meeting at 3:30 only 3 miles from our house at the Colonnade. But they couldn't be there until 3:20, so we decided to go to the meeting without Kristine. At the last minute as we were driving away, my parents drove up so we scrambled to get Kristine in the car and get to the meeting on time. Smooth sailing on the drive and we walked into the meeting at exactly 3:30 and were pretty much shocked at what we saw. I thought there would be five or six people in the room since I thought there were only two other racers and everybody would have a similarly sized crew of two people. Well, there must have been 20-25 people in the room with 4 other racers (5 total) doing the race!
"500 mile pre-race meeting, getting real now!" Race director Tom Robertshaw was standing up in the blue shirt giving the pre-race instructions while I instagrammed this pic below. Most of his instructions were route related and brief review of the UMCA rules regarding lights.
One thing that came up that I had missed in the rules was required reflective tape or stickers on the wheels and cranks. I did not have anything reflective on my bike. We stopped by a hardware store on the way home and bought some reflective tape, but I remembered that I had bought some reflective stickers years and years ago to put on my helmet. I found the leftover stickers and thanks to Kristine's suggestion and help, I used clear packing tape to secure about 10 stickers per wheel and 3 stickers per crank. This took a surprisingly long time, at least an hour to put all the stickers on both sides of my four wheels. I wasn't sure how well it would hold, but it was both aerodynamic and amazingly secure.
Towards the end of the pre-race meeting, Tom indicated that we would be starting in 2 minute intervals starting at 8pm. He asked for volunteers to go first, and I shot my hand up as fast as I could realizing that it was going to be challenging enough for my crew without us having to pass other teams and their support vehicles. I didn't know what to expect out of the other racers including a rider from Italy, but I figured that I might be the fastest given that I had a realistic shot at the record and that the record has stood for so many years. That's the one downside of living so close to the start and timing everything so close – I didn't really have an opportunity to meet the other riders. There was a total of five racers, and I believe I met three of them. Everybody was super nice and offered to help. It was not nearly the cut-throat mentality I had imagined ultra-endurance racing would be.
The Start – Friday, April 4th at 8pm CST
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With the car being packed full, there wasn't a lot of room for my bike. I decided that it would be easier if I simply rode to the start – about 3 miles down Acton Rd. I realized a flaw in this plan about halfway there because I didn't have any tools in case of a flat or problem. Fortunately, no flats for the short ride and, furthermore, no flats or mechanical problems of any kind for the next 500+ miles either!
When I arrived at the start, I saw the RVs of two of the other racers and then saw Kristine, Dale, Pat Casey, and Heather Hagan near the parking lot entrance. I rolled up at about 7:40. Race director Tom came right over and inspected my bike to make sure it had all the required reflective material – check! Then we took pictures. During that time Chris Shelton came over right as we were mounting the "Caution Bikes Ahead" sign to the back of the car, which turned out to be Chris's sign he had loaned to Tom a couple years ago. Five minutes to go and Heather took this picture with my phone, I instagrammed it really quick, and a minute or two later I was off!
"5 min to start, let's do this"
The course started out down Blue Lake Rd and turned onto Sicard Hollow Rd, which has several steep rollers. Dale was driving first, and it took a while for him to adjust to my sudden changes in speed as the road rolled down and then back up. I really wanted to hit the descents hard in order to take the climbs easier, but the negative consequence of this was my speed dramatically changing throughout rolling sections – from 10mph to 40+mph back down to 10mph all within half a mile. This made it tough for whoever was driving to match my speed and stay close. This upset me at the beginning because I really needed the headlights for the rough sections of Sicard Hollow. I stayed within the range of the headlights, but not close enough so that I could use the lights to see the nasty sections of road. Instead, I had to rely on my Axiom light set to its maximum power and a knowledge of the location of every pothole from having ridden the road hundreds of times. Everything turned out fine, but I called back to my crew several times (I had my phone with me) to let them know I was displeased. This is all within 5-10 minutes of the start of the race.
Once we made it onto the flatter roads of US-78 and AL-25, my speed stayed constant and pretty fast. I couldn't believe how fast I was flying with what felt like very little effort. As it turns out, there was a nice westerly wind blowing, which my Martindale wheels picked up as a cross-tailwind and pushed me forward incredibly fast. About half a mile before the I-20 intersection, I saw an eighteen wheeler sitting at a factory exit about to pull out. Fortunately, we made it past him just in time, and I sprinted to the next section to the 4-way stop to make sure he didn't try and pass before the stop. I stopped at the stop sign and then took off again, thankful that they had removed the stop sign on the other side of the bridge and also at the Co Rd 10 intersection half a mile later.
We flew along Kelly Creek Rd until I tried to coordinate on the phone our first pee break. After calling to tell Kristine, I found a quiet section of road at the top of a hill in the dark, signaled I was pulling over, and expected the follow car to pull halfway off the road (keep in mind these roads are absolutely deserted!). This was something we hadn't talked about ahead of time or practiced at all, so Dale didn't know what to do. I thought they were going to pee, too, but since I was already finished by the time Dale had gotten the car completely off the road in what felt like a parallel parking maneuver, I was already ready to take off again. I told them to hold it and took off. I was not very nice and for that I'm very, very sorry! Looking back, I realized now that I had not prepared either Dale or Kristine at all for what to expect. I just assumed that everything would seem obvious, but that is the problem with riding bikes, doing races, doing group rides, for years and years and years – what seems obvious to me is not going to seem obvious at all to people who have never done any of these things. Lesson #1 learned in the first hour of the race.
I kept thinking of the Iron War book and how I am much more like ironman athlete Dave Scott than his rival Mark Allen. Kristine had downloaded that book for our drive up Iron Cross in Pennsylvania last year, and we listened to the entire book on the trip. She had it again for her and Dale to listen to while they were following me. In the book, Dave is described as constantly berating his crew sometimes bringing them to tears, whereas Mark Allen is described with the ability to take everything in stride. As far as athletes go, it seems Dave showed more fire, more raw passion, but Mark internalized and pushed through adversity more on his own without taking it out on his crew.
Flying – miles 0-200 including Lookout Mountain
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US-231 north and AL-144 all the way to Co Rd 73 outside of Jacksonville were brand new roads to me. We crossed the Coosa River for the first of four times at the Neely Dam. With a nice tailwind, and generally flat roads, I averaged 20.1 mph to the first time station 73 miles into the race in Jacksonville. During UMCA ultra-endurance races, there are several time stations where the crew simply calls in your time at a designated spot using their cell phones. The spot, however, is chosen based on the location of physical land line phones for those racers who choose to do the race without a cellphone. I think that is absolutely awesome. This spot was not too far after passing Cooter Brown's Rib Shack, which I remembered from this epic adventure climbing ride while Kristine was working in Anniston. In any case, I was flying as we headed north on the 4-lane highway of AL-21. Kristine was happy to report in after calling in the first time split. Shortly before Piedmont, we stopped for another pee break and my crew switched drivers (about 4 hours into the race).
Heading north from Piedmont on AL-9 was a fun, rolling road but the temp had started to drop and I was still in shorts and short sleeves. I was getting cold as the temp was in the low 40s by now but opted to wait until the climb from Leesburg onto Lookout Mountain to put on leg and arm warmers. During the climb, I pushed the pace hard wondering if I could get the KOM at a sub-threshold pace. By the top of the climb, it was cold enough I decided to forego the arm warmers and switch to my winter cycling jacket that I had thrown into the car at the last minute thinking I wouldn't need it. The terrain across the top of Lookout Mountain is some of my favorite terrain for riding – nothing flat and everything is at least 10% up or down … none of this 3-5% flat stuff, which makes for some really fast average speeds but doesn't give you the adrenaline rush of a 50mph descent or the challenge of a steep climb. 10% up or down constantly means that you are either absolutely flying or crawling, both of which are fun to me. I like the crawling parts because it's easier to look around and take everything in and think. I like the fast 45-50mph parts because, well, they are fast.
Even though it was at night, this was definitely my favorite part of the ride. Rather than detailing everything in narrative form, let me just highlight the key parts of our 60+ miles spent atop lookout mountain:
- Passing through Dogtown, Alabama at 3 in the morning with, guess what, lots of dogs was fun. Also, the county sheriff was sitting at the 4-way stop – presumably looking for drunk drivers blowing through the stop sign. I stopped, waved, and made the turn to head over to Little River Canyon. We probably saw 20-30 county sheriffs or city police throughout the entire race and none of them stopped or questioned us.
- Little River Canyon – constant rollers, lots of gravel and debris on the roads from the heavy rains and storms the night before. One tree was down blocking the righthand side of the road. This was in a descent around a blind curve, but we made it no problem. Kristine posted the picture I've included after the highlights. No view over the side of the canyon, but you could tell that there was a large drop-off, and I could hear loud waterfalls at several points along the route. Also, we saw bunny rabbits hopping away a few times in the grassy sections next to the road.
- Camp Comer, where Josiah and I spent the night at the boy scout camp for Cub Haunted this past fall was another highlight on the route. We had an absolute blast, so it was fun to reminisce about our time there. We stopped, and I took the pic below which I would instagram later when Kristine and Dale drove ahead to get breakfast for themselves and coffee for me after sunrise near LaFayette.
- Cloudmont ski resort and Dan Taylor's family house – we passed these landmarks approaching Time Station 2. Cloudmont is Alabama's only ski area, with one slope and a tow rope. My friend Dan Taylor from Birmingham sponsored the cycling team I was racing for back in 2008 when we had an epic team camp in January of 2008 – quite the bonding experience. See last of the three pics below
Riding through my favorite road of the entire route – little river canyon
"Still going well, stopped at camp comer, Josiah cub scouts camp"
2008 Tria Cycling team on the last day of our winter training camp at sponsor Dan Taylor's house atop Lookout Mountain next to Alabama's only ski resort (Mentone). The inset picture is from the Tria Cycling podium sweep of the Cat 3 race at Pepper Place at the end of the season. Left to right: Wes Douglas, Jacob Tubbs, Philip Thompson, Lennie Moon, Mike Lackey, Brent Marshall, Brian Toone (me), Daniel Taylor, and Darryl Seelhorst. Dan Taylor was taking the picture. In the inset from left to right – Sammy Flores, Philip Thompson, and Jacob Tubbs.
I stopped somewhere along Co Rd 89 to duct tape my shoes. I had not brought any shoe covers because I wasn't expecting temps near freezing anywhere along the ride. It's amazing the difference made by duct-taping all the ventilation holes and also the "worn-out-from-too-many-miles" holes on the shoes. At the bottom of the fast descent off Lookout Mountain, I saw the coldest temps of the entire ride at 32 degF. An hour or two later outside of LaFayette, GA, I instagrammed this pic during one of the sections where Kristine and Dale had left me to go get breakfast for themselves and coffee for me.
"Wasn't expecting temps in the 30s. Duct tape really is the fix for everything!"
The water bottle coffee was great for warming me up, but the temps had also started to climb pretty quickly into the upper 30s and lower 40s by the time I made it to Snake Creek Gap about 210 miles into the ride. At this point, I needed to recharge my Garmin. I had a cool on-the-bike charging solution that I will describe later in the equipment section of this post.
"Georgia is blooming to welcome us! Almost 200 miles done in 10hrs 40min. @kartoone76 is amazing!"
Climbing – miles 200-400 including Fort Mountain
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Time Station 3 was at a Love's truck stop at I-75 in Resaca, GA. Coming down from Snake Creek Gap with still a bit of a cross-tailwind, I made great time. The wind was clearly coming from the north, now, which I thought was awesome b/c it would mean a general tailwind for the route back home. I knew that the turn onto GA-225 due north towards Chatsworth and Fort Mountain would be brutal. And it was. Strong headwind. The road was rolling so that on some of the steeper downhills, you got a bit of a break from the wind. We took advantage of a porta-potty in a construction area almost directly on the route in Chatsworth for a quick potty break.
Towards the bottom of the climb up Fort Mountain, we stopped at a pull-out so I could take off my leg and arm warmers. Temps were still in the upper 40s, but I knew that it would be getting warmer as I climbed for the next hour. Also, I figured the effort I would be putting out would be more than enough to keep me warm on the climb. This worked out well, and the temps had warmed enough by the top I didn't even need to stop to put any extra clothes on for the long descent. Kristine snapped this pic at the overlook near the top, where I had stopped on my pre-ride of this portion of the course and talked to some motorcycle riders. I knew from my pre-ride the week before that the climb wasn't steep and that the descent on the backside had lots of short steep uphills. Still, there were some steeper sections of the descent and I maxed out at just under 52mph. Thankfully this was during the day so I didn't have to worry about staying within the headlights of the follow car. They were quite far behind by the bottom of the steeper part of the descent.
"Climbing up Fort Mountain in GA to the 250-mile point – the turnaround! Somewhere around 14 hours in for my stud @kartoone76! #HOTS500″
Elijay was super busy so we decided for the follow vehicle to head up the road and wait at the next turn. This made it easier for cars to pass, but unfortunately my follow vehicle missed the turn. No worries, though, because I made the turn and after they figured out they had missed the turn, they caught back up to me pretty quickly on one of the hardest stretches of road – GA-382. This was a very hilly section of the course with steep uphills and long gradual downhills (I prefer it the other way around). It was still a really fun section of the course, and we passed a couple sag stops for an organized ride being held in the area. At the end of GA-382 was GA-136, a much flatter but more exposed road. The wind coming out of the northwest was a strong cross-headwind, which is one of the hardest wind configurations to battle with deep aero wheels. Nevertheless, the scenery was nice and I just plugged along until we made it back to Time Station 4. It was encouraging during this difficult section to know that I was approaching 300 miles covered with only 200 miles to go!
"Fort Mtn in the distance, that @kartoone76 climbed 50 miles ago. Approaching the 300-mi mark in the next half hour. #keepridingBrian #HOTS500″
My longest stop of the day was at the Love's truck stop (Time Station #4). Shortly before stopping, I saw one of the other competitors pulling away from the time station. I was nearly 100 miles ahead of him! This was my first inkling that I might be really far ahead of everyone else. I still didn't know where everybody else was, so in the back of my mind I was driven by the thought that whoever was following might roll up on me every time I stopped. By this point in the race, however, I was more than content to change clothes, eat a full sandwich and sun chips, and enjoy the warm sun in the parking lot.
Kristine's post on twitter celebrating mile 300 two hours ahead of a record-breaking pace. At this point I only needed to ride the last 200 miles in 13 hours to break the record.
I was a little apprehensive as I went to start riding again that I wouldn't be able to pedal the bike at all. Lo and behold, my legs, tendons, bones hurt a bit but nothing to the point of making me question whether I could ride 200 more miles. In fact, I was surprised what a little rest did and hit the pace pretty hard — especially since the turn onto the next road meant several county roads all with a nice tailwind. Unfortunately, there were several stop signs through this beautiful tailwind section. There is nothing more frustrating than hammering along with a tailwind (on a downhill no less) and then have to slam on the brakes for a pointless 4-way stop with good visibility. Nevertheless, the rules are the rules, and I stopped at each stop sign.
Sikes Story Rd led to Big Texas Valley Rd where we had a bit of a crew miscommunication. Actually, my crew did exactly what I told them to do – head up the road to Friday Rd (the next turn) and wait for me there. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how long Big Texas Valley Rd was. I ran out of food shortly after they left me, and there was no cellphone coverage to call them and ask/beg them to come back with some food. I did this whole section of Big Texas Valley Rd very hungry and worried that I was hungry with no food. When I made the turn onto Friday Rd, I flew past them and hollered for food angrily even though me running out of food was my own fault.
A few minutes later, Kristine had a bagel with cream cheese ready for me. I apologized for yelling and enjoyed the section of Friday Rd which was pretty nice and hilly. At this point of the race, my recollections are going to get farther apart because my brain's normal recording mode was switching over to more of a survival mode. Still, I do remember a few things highlighted below:
- Generally heading south and southeast with a tailwind. Weather starting to get chilly as the sunset. Being disappointed at how far apart the towns of Cave Spring and Cedartown were.
- A couple swamp-like areas near Cave Spring
- Happy to make the turn onto US-278 knowing it was taking me back to Alabama, but then really disappointed with how long it was taking me to get to the small Hardin Rd turn. I kept thinking that each next side street would be the turn to take me across the Chief Ladiga trail and back into Alabama. And then it would be some other random street!
- Being chased by dogs almost as soon as I crossed the border into Alabama. Welcome to Alabama!
- The hills on the foothills road race course not being as steep as I remember them. I think that is because the only other times I have ridden those hills is at max effort during a Pro/1/2 road race with a lot of pros. The hills are a lot easier if you can just spin up them easy!
- White Plains Rd in the near-dark with instagram and facebook beeps going off every minute or so … more on that in a minute
- Endless AL-9 in the dark(I thought I only had less than a mile to ride on it, but in reality it was nearly 8 miles!)
- An extremely busy gas station stop and bathroom break immediately before tackling Cheaha
About the instagram beeps – I was starting to struggle around mile 400 being a bit sleepy and tired. I gave Kristine my phone and asked her to instagram something so I could hear the "beeps of encouragement" with the phone back in my back pocket after she finished instagramming. For the first couple minutes, there was nothing, and I thought "oops, bad idea, better forget about it". But then a beep, and another beep, and pretty soon my back pocket was beeping at least twice a minute. You all really pulled through and it was super encouraging for the next hour. Here is the picture she instagrammed and cross-posted to facebook:
I had taken this picture when I reset the Garmin about 12 hours earlier near Snake Creek Gap. Kristine's caption: "An old photo, but 100 miles to go! Like this or comment and Brian will hear the alert in his pocket! And go!"
Real Climbing – miles 400-450 with Mount Cheaha
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This takes us to Mount Cheaha, which I have ridden many times. The road has deteriorated quite a bit over the years. Believe it or not, the road used to be fairly decent chip and seal until one year they decided to redo the chip and seal and did an absolutely horrible job of it (although I think it might have been intentional to try and slow cars, motorcycles, and cyclists down). They put down some horrible chip and seal with too much chip and too much seal. So you have these sharp, rough rocks sealed in place that don't move. You have to try to find a clean line over them while trying to maximize your downhill speed for the next insane uphill with gradients approaching or exceeding 20%. This was all in the dark, so I relied a lot on my headlight as Kristine again had a hard time staying close enough for her headlights to be much good since she was not allowed to use her high beams at any time during the race.
I knew the climbs would be hard, but there were more of them than I remember on Horseblock mountain. I usually approach Cheaha from Co Rd 24, which cuts off a bunch of the steep hills before Horseblock. I thought there would be one or two, but it felt like there were at least five sharp steep hills before even reaching the final steep climb up Horseblock shortly after Co Rd 24. I kept waiting and hoping to see the AL-49 sign because I knew that meant I had reached the Cheaha climb itself which has a few 10% sections, but is much tamer than any of the climbs leading up to it. Across the top, we did a super fast bottle exchange and clothing exchange while pulled off at the state park entrance. Several people camping out at the park hollered encouragement as I biked by at about 9:30PM – probably bikers who were themselves doing the Cheaha Challenge the next day.
By this point I was really cold and starting to get very, very sleepy. The first part of the Cheaha descent including the sharp turn onto the Old Cheaha Challenge course to Camp Mac is insane enough to keep you awake, but once I made it through that part of the descent my troubles began. We stopped in Camp Mac for food exchange and to assess everything before the last steep descent off the mountain. I realized how sleepy I was when I fell asleep standing up next to the car. We made it down the final and probably most dangerous part of the descent b/c of the steep dropoff into the river canyon at the last ramp down to the bottom. We made it down OK, and I think the fact that I knew we were down with the last major course obstacle out of the way caused me to relax a bit – which led to the next 67 miles being pretty much absolute hell.
Sleeping – miles 450-517 including Vandiver
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There is no other way to describe it. I wanted to sleep so badly yet I knew I couldn't. I would force myself awake by trying to stomp on the pedals or stand up and pedal (I did a LOT of standing during the last 3 hours of the race). There is no feeling like wanting to sleep, being 75% (or more) asleep, and then being forced awake. That moment of coming back from 75% sleep state is so mentally painful. Rinse and repeat to various degrees and you have the last 67 miles of the race.
Before that though, down at the bottom of Cheaha, I was extremely cold, shaking cold. The air temp was still in the 50s but my heartrate was down in the 80s and 90s. I no longer had enough left to push the pedals hard enough to even remotely stress my aerobic system. So with temps in the 50s, I had the following clothes on: shorts, leg warmers, fully duck-taped shoes, jersey, and winter cycling jacket. This still wasn't enough to keep me warm, so we stopped for me to add a layer — Kristine's hooded sweatshirt with the hood up over my ears under my helmet — and rearrange the layer order so that my winter cycling jacket was on top of everything since it is more wind resistant. This still wasn't enough to keep me warm but it was warm enough. In fact, it was probably good that it wasn't too warm or I probably would have lost my battle to fight off sleep if I had been toasty warm.
When we made it to the town of Talladega, we headed straight for the McDonald's where I sat in the car with the heat blasting while Kristine and her dad went inside to get coffee for me and for themselves (Kristine was half asleep as well). This was our second longest stop of the entire race, but it actually did serve to wake me up a bit. Teenagers were hanging out in the parking lot next to the McDonald's blasting some music and just having fun. For some reason this was refreshing to me.
I have ridden to and from Mount Cheaha from my house a number of times, and the race route followed my preferred route almost to the T so I thought that would be helpful in keeping me awake. It really wasn't. I was just too sleepy. I think it would have given me physical strength, but I was not in a mental state to really use it. I was just awake enough to pedal in a straight line, make all the turns, and coast on the downhills. In retrospect, I probably should not have coasted the downhills because that led to the following problem: coast sleeping. I'd be awake enough to focus on the downhill and then by the time the road flattened out or started to kick back up again, I would relax, forget to pedal, and come nearly to a stop. The physical act of almost stopping would then jolt me back into being fully awake.
It's kinda sad because I would have absolutely loved the last bit of the race with all of my out/back rides to Cheaha having involved some form of epic adventure or another. I would probably have been in tears so happy to be on really familiar roads, so happy to be so close to being done, reminiscing back to previous epic adventures (e.g., this one on superbowl sunday). Instead, it really was a form of torture, each agonizing minute wanting to be asleep, but forced awake by the road, by Kristine honking, or by the simple desire to push through to the finish. No tears, no reminiscing, just a painful, painful effort to stay awake, to watch out for road hazards, and to not fall asleep. I have short glimpses of sections I remember, but most of them were disappointment realizing some other obstacle. For example, on the Vandiver climb, there are two curve signs – the first one which means you have a bit farther to go and then the sharp turn which means you are almost to the top. I remember a feeling of disappointment when I saw the first curve sign. I don't even remember the second curve sign, cresting the top, or the first part of the descent. I remember the bottom part of the descent because I knew how dangerous it was and was awake enough to safely negotiate the turns at some ridiculously slow pace. I don't remember the railroad track crossing or even going through the small town of Dunnavant, but I do remember the steep climb on the Hwy 25 rollers. I kept wondering if the dog in the house on the left, which is rarely out, would be out and chase me down. This led to my next thought, which was of the dogs at the next house on the left which had bitten me over 20 years earlier on one of my first rides on AL-25 – dogs that are probably long dead, but I wondered if they would be out … ghost dogs. I don't remember the curves before the final descent, but I remember seeing the fog again on Elliot and thinking how 30+ hours earlier, that same fog was forming out of the valley. No recollection of Hwy 119, Zeigler, or Rex Lake. I remember more of the Sicard Hollow section because I kicked it up again after the four-way stop at Grants Mill. I think I stood up from the four-way stop all the way past Liberty Park and never let up on the pedals.
The Finish – Sunday, April 6th at 3:48am CST
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It wasn't until I crossed Grants Mill Rd that I started to wake up again. At this point, the reality started to hit that I only had a few miles left to finish. Whatever adrenaline I had left came back to the surface and that pushed out the sleep. I stood up and hammered the last bit as hard as I could. By the time I made it to the finish, I was much more awake than I had been the previous 50 miles. I wanted to ride back to the house, but Kristine cleared out a spot in the back of the car while I was taking pictures with race director Tom, who had come out to Vandiver to check on us and then taken 280 back to the Colonnade to be there when we arrived. Tom helped me put the bike in the back of the car. I crawled into the car, and Kristine drove the final three miles home. All three of us slept until 12:30 in the afternoon without waking up once during the entire morning. It was probably the soundest sleep I've had in years.
I was disappointed to have missed breaking the course record after being two hours ahead of it over 300 miles into the race. I was disappointed to be so sleepy after only 400 miles. But then Kristine pointed out that I had not slept at all prior to the start of the race at 8PM. In a normal race starting in the morning, I believe I would have made it the full 500+ miles without the same sleep issues. Also, I was looking back at the reports for when the record was set in 2005 and 2006. Back then, they were able to choose a start time, with Chris MacDonald choosing 7AM for his start time in 2005 and Tinker Juarez choosing his start time of 5AM in 2006. This means both of them had a somewhat normal night of sleep immediately ahead of the race. I, instead, had a normal work day prior to the start of my race! I feel very confident that I would have either broken the record or come much, much closer to it without all the sleep problems.
Kristine took this picture, and then I instagrammed it on the short 3 mile drive home: "1st place! 31:48″
The centerpiece of this race for me was my Martindale 6.0 wheels shown at the top of this post with the reflective stickers. I have raced a long time and used all kinds of wheels, but these are the smoothest and most aerodynamic wheels I've ever raced. I had no mechanical problems or flat tires, but I had a second set of Martindale wheels – the 2.8 models ready to go as backup. Here's the full list of all my equipment and backup equipment in the car:
- Trek Madone 5.9 – 2013 model frame
- Ultrega Di2 electronic shifting
- Martindale 6.0 wheels
- Vittoria Rubino Pro Slick 25mm tires
- Merckx setup (no tri-bars)
- Speedplay zero pedals
- Garmin Edge 800
- iBike Newton+
- Gomadic solar battery pack – I think it's a discontinued model
- (2) axiom 200 watt front lights – used one at a time while other re-charged
- (2) axiom usb rear lights – used one at a time while other re-charged
- (1) axiom dual purpose light – used to supplement the cheaha descent
Backup equipment in the follow vehicle (all of it unused) -
- Martindale 2.8 wheels
- Full frame pump
- Two brand new vittoria rubino pro slick 25mm tires
- Backup bike – Scott Addict with SRAM force components, no wheels
- Two ziplock bags full of tire levers, tubes, chain tool, allen wrenches
- Backup shoes with speedplay cleats already mounted
- Backup speedplay pedals
- Several battery packs "bricks" for charging crew devices and my lights
- Garmin Edge 705 – sometimes in my pocket, sometimes in the follow car. Did not end up needing any of this data.
Nutrition and Drugs
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I do not like taking any kind of medicine at all because I simply do not like medicine. So my body is super sensitive to pain medication. I took two alleve about an hour before the start of the race. About 18 hours later sometime around mid-day when my body was starting to hurt a bit, I took two more alleve. That is the only pain meds I took during the race. Nothing after the race, and I didn't really start to feel any kind of major pain until late afternoon on Sunday after waking up from sleep. Two more alleve on Sunday afternoon. One on Monday morning, and none since then. Everything is back to normal.
As far as nutrition goes, I stayed on top of it for the first 12-16 hours of the race eating a powerbar harvest bar (250 calories) at least once an hour. I really like powerbars, but it turns out that there really is a limit to the number you can eat. Sometime after Fort Mountain, I didn't want to eat any more powerbars. Kristine had a whole bunch of panera bagels and cream cheese – so she made three or four of those over the next several hours. I also started to rely more on the caffeinated powergels and gu roctanes. In addition to all of that, I didn't drink any water during the entire race – it was all orange gatorade and orange powerade. That adds another 150-200 calories per hour. At the Love's truck stop (time station #4), I had a ham and cheese sandwich and half a bag of sunchips. Late in the race I was craving salt, and Kristine got me something that was pretty salty but I was half asleep and don't even remember what it was now. Altogether, Strava calculates from my Quarq power meter that I did 20,307 kJ of work during the race and burned 22,643 calories. I would suspect that I consumed somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 calories. I had a really light riding week leading up to the race and ate a lot so I had gained weight — all the way up to 149 pounds shortly before the race start. I forgot to weigh myself after the race, but a week later and after eating everything in sight all week, I'm still hovering around 144 pounds, meaning that it is safe to assume that I lost more than 5 pounds of non-water weight during the race. Unfortunately, I suspect that at least a pound of that was muscle but hopefully the rest was fat.
I am aiming to race the Race Across America in 2015 and be competitive. If that is going to happen, I need to learn a lot from this race. I think I have learned a lot:
- Plan, prepare, and communicate. They say that one of the hardest things about RAAM is the crew. Not only do you have the logistics to deal with, but you also have people having to endure a lot of sleeplessness and boredom. The more I can prepare people for what to expect, the better.
- I've got to stay on top of sleep. My general plan for the race has been to sleep less at the beginning and more later, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. I'm thinking more along the lines of 500 miles riding, 6 hours sleep, 500 miles riding, 6 hours sleep, etc… This would put me across the country in approximately 180 hours + 30 hours sleep = 210 hours = 8.75 days = a really good time for RAAM, certainly nowhere near the records of under 8 days, but also still the possibility to place well in the 2015 results while getting a sane amount of sleep each night.
- Nutrition is going to be tricky. I should probably mix more in than just powerbars from the beginning. My go-to food can be powerbars, but I should alternate in bagels, salty things such as trail mix, and other non-bar items so that I don't get sick of powerbars so quickly and not be able to eat them anymore.
- Garmin charging setup worked really well. I'll plan on doing at least one 500 mile leg in a single Garmin file just to see if it can make it, with backup options in case the Garmin crashes. My solar battery pack is really light and fits well in my back pocket. I have a green mini-usb cable that can reach out of my back pocket and up to the handlebars to charge the Garmin while I ride. It never came unplugged at all while riding, and it didn't interfere much although the cable would bang into my leg very lightly with each pedal stroke. I got used to it after a few minutes.
- I need a hands-free set for my phone. It was annoying having to fish my phone out of my pocket, especially at night with long finger gloves. A hands-free set would simplify everything and allow for more constant contact with the crew. Also, I'm going to need to think of a good charging solution or battery pack for the phone, possibly a second solar battery pack as they are so lightweight.
One more time, the map of the course overlaid on the raised relief maps of the southeast that I've had up for years on my wall in the basement – the entire course fits on the map!
Heart of the south 500 mile course – raised relief maps
Heart of the South 500
Quick summary – 1st place in a time of 31 hours and 48 minutes. I was hoping to break the record, but ended up about an hour and a half short of the record times of Chris MacDonald and Tinker Juarez who both had nearly identical times a year apart (2005 and 2006). Sleep issues late in the race were my downfall. I simply could not stay awake well enough to remember to pedal at the bottom of downhills. I'd concentrate just hard enough to make it down a hill safely, relax a bit and slow to a near stop. Just before losing enough momentum to fall over, I'd wake up and start pedaling again. This only happened a few times, but it gives you an idea of how much I was struggling with staying awake. Even so, I had a blast and learned a lot of important lessons during my first ultra-endurance race. My crew consisted of my wife Kristine and father-in-law Dale, who both had to endure sleep deprivation but without the physical exercise that helps keep you awake. They also had to endure me being very grumpy if they didn't have exactly what I needed at the exact moment I needed. They did really, really well and as my friend Chris Shelton told me before the race – the hardest part of these ultra-endurance races is being a member of the crew. After having started at 8PM on Friday night with what I now realize was a completely unrealistic goal of being the first person to ever finish on Saturday, I rolled into the finish at the Colonnade at 3:48AM Sunday morning. I was discouraged after the finish thinking how much I was struggling with sleep after just 32 hours of racing — but then Kristine pointed out that I had been up since 6 Friday morning, biked to work, taught two classes, biked home, and then started getting ready for the race Friday afternoon with no naps. Altogether, I had been up for over 45 hours straight without sleep. That is really at the human limit of sleeplessness (I think!).
The maps and data
Even though this ride was only in two states, it did cross about half of each state twice. Along the way, I went through 16 different counties, hitting five counties twice for a grand total of 21 county line traversals (that's a lot of sprint lines ;-))
ALABAMA counties outbound: Jefferson, St Clair, Calhoun, Cherokee, Dekalb. GEORGIA counties: Chattooga, Walker, Gordon, Murray, Gilmer, Gordon (again), Floyd, Polk. ALABAMA counties inbound: Cleburne, Calhoun (again), Clay, Cleburne (again), Talladega, St Clair (again), Shelby, Jefferson (again)
Annotated topocreator map of the 500 mile race, includes approximate timing station times (click to enlarge and view a 12 MB map, click a second time to zoom in on your browser)
Annotated iBike data for the entire 500 mile route. You can see the trends of decreasing power and heartrate. You can also see exactly where I started to struggle with sleep b/c I basically stopped pedaling all the time creating a wall of cadence lines where it would drop to zero and then back up to a slow cadence.
I'll save all the details for another post, but I wanted to get a somewhat quick post out here with the annotated data with a quick summary. I'll leave the details and lessons learned for a post later this week as I work on piecing everything together. Thanks y'all for the support. Special thanks to Heather Hagan, Pat Casey, and Chris Shelton who all came out to see me off at the start. Also, huge thanks to Kristine and my father-in-law Dale who crewed for me and endured the same sleeplessness that I endured!
Catching up on some epic adventures
Life has been busy and is about to get busier, but I've had some pretty crazy adventures I wanted to blog about. These are ordered below based on when they happened, so you can jump to any specific one with these links:
American Flyers | Just a little commute | Grant ups and downs
March 8-9th – American Flyers – Rouge Roubaix
My all-time favorite cycling movie out of the two that I've seen is American Flyers. In the opening scene, the lead actor is racing a barge along the Mississippi River. Then he rides into his building and onto the elevator. I do the latter every day on my commute to work, but I've never gotten to race a barge on the Mississippi until my Rouge Roubaix pre-ride this year. The race itself was epic as always – read my race report, but man sometimes I think the pre-rides are more adventurous than the races themselves … see Hell of the South exception, though.
Racing a barge on the Mississippi River – I just "American Flyered" my ride.
One of the ironic things about the Rouge Roubaix race is how close the course is to the Mississippi River, but you can never see the river from any spot on the course unless it is in severe flood stage (see pic below)
Google street-view of the turn onto 2nd gravel. The Mississippi River was at flood stage when the streetview car drove by. During the race, you cannot normally see the river. For my pre-ride I parked at the store annotated in the picture.
This was my fifth year racing Rouge Roubaix, but I had never gone out of my way to see the river because my time spent there is usually so short. I wanted to include a trip out to the river in my pre-ride this year. I ended up picking a route onto Cat Island that veered off of the race course shortly after the third gravel section (Tunica Hills). My route plan was about 50 miles, which I thought would give me plenty of time to just cruise through the second and third gravel section. After a late start on the 7 hour drive from Birmingham plus a bit of a challenge figuring out where to park and not upset the locals (turns out I could have parked pretty much anywhere), I only had less than 3 hours of daylight left. Not exactly a lot of time to ride the 2nd and 3rd gravel sections plus the 2nd gravel section again on the return route.
I was enjoying a nice easy pre-ride, but as my brain ticked away at timing calculations I realized that there was no way I was going to finish before sunset. I picked up the pace and realized that I was probably going to be making it to the turn-around point of my ride sometime near sunset. Stubbornly, I decided that seeing the river this year was worth riding in the dark with no light. The next challenge was finding a way to the river. I knew that the road I picked out onto Cat Island swung close to the river, but not until pretty far into the island. The road kept getting muddier from rain and floods (pic below was from the early part of the road where it was still easily rideable … imagine entire short sections of road covered in thick mud), so I decided when I caught a glimpse of the river behind a gate with a short dirt road leading right up to the edge that I had found my entry spot.
Cat Island road – good practice for finding a good line for the rouge roubaix race
Dirt double track to the river – barge visible in the river
Right after carefully climbing the fence and setting my bike over on the other side, a barge started to pass by on the river. That is when I knew I had to get a pic of the barge. Unsure whether I was going to stumble into a herd of bulls or cows, I took off like a rabbit down the double track to get to the river's edge and get a pic. The pic at the top is what I was able to get. So in some sense the barge won because it made it past my access spot to the river, but in another sense I won because it was still close enough for me to get a pic!
As you can see from the lighting in the picture, it was near sunset by the time I had finally seen the river. I was taking a slightly different route back to skip the Tunica Hills dirt section, but I still had over 25 miles left to get back to my car parked at Fort Adams. Plus, the very last part of the ride would be the reverse direction of the 2nd gravel section (i.e., backwards down Blockhouse Hill).
Sunset happened before I even made it off Cat Island. By the time I made it out to LA-66, the main road to Angola Prison, it was dark and dangerous (from traffic). I spent most of the 5 mile stretch of road looking backwards ascertaining whether an approaching car was slowing down and/or moving over to pass me. Only twice did it look questionable and both of those happened to be near sections of the road where there was a shoulder so I moved over into the shoulder. When I finally made the turn off LA-66 onto Pinckneyville Rd, I was super relieved even though it was now way past sunset and very difficult to see. Pinckneyville Rd is an interesting chip/seal road that has some really nice sections interspersed with short rough "repaved" or "washed out" sections.
Ironically, the darker it got, the faster I went as I desperately tried to cover as much ground as possible while still able to see the rough sections with just enough time to grab the brakes and roll over them at a non-pinch flat inducing pace. When I made the turn onto the Blockhouse section, I had to rely entirely on the GPS and the fact that I could see a house up on the left to know that I had reached the turn! It was so dark that I could barely see the turn and could not even see the cattle guard. I was wondering if I had made a wrong turn when all of a sudden I bounced across the cattle guard … "yep, I'm good, this is the way".
The Blockhouse gravel was in great condition, and I knew this from riding it on the way out at the start of my ride. Also, it was a brighter, lighter color because of the sand mixed in with the gravel. This meant that this section was a bit easier than Picneyville Rd to ride in the dark. I could see two things – black and slightly less black which I knew was the gravel road split into a double track. I tried to stay to the left side of the road hoping that I was judging the right spot to end up in the lefthand track. I stopped at one point to try to take a picture of the conditions. These are three pics that I got:
Top – Blockhouse in the dark (with flash). Middle – My iBike and Garmin on Blockhouse (with flash). Bottom – the road ahead without flash, not even enough light to make ANYTHING out. Although this is partially because my Nokia Lumia 1020 with great low light photography doesn't always auto-detect its settings correctly. If I had manually set the exposure to a couple seconds, you would have been able to see the blurry outline of the road.
By the bottom of the Blockhouse Hill, the road turns from gravel to a partial pavement – which was in really bad shape. Fortunately, this was in a small community that had street lights spaced just far enough apart that I could safely make out all the potholes and slowly ride through. They were having a big party at one of the houses, and some of the kids shouted "hey biker dude" or something like that as I biked by. Epic. Adventure. Life.
March 24th – Short commute to North Georgia
Map showing my commute from Hoover, AL to Blairsville, GA in the North Georgia mountains. Click twice to enlarge and see all the annotations. The solid red line is an approximation of my route – the dashed red line at the end is the part that I didn't finish due to being way slower than expected. These maps are on the wall in our basement next to where I do all my work from home. I get to see some of my favorite places in the country in a raised relief map, including the highest points in AL, GA, TN, SC, and NC!
Kristine bought a groupon for three nights at the Paradise Hills cabins just outside of Blairsville, GA almost a year ago. The plan was for the two of us to go up there sometime in January or February for me to do some pre-riding of the Southern Cross course. Well, life happened and we couldn't schedule it, so we switched to a back-up plan of going over spring break and taking the whole family. With the Heart of the South 500 mile race coming up, I decided to ride what I thought would be 300 miles from Birmingham to the cabin as a "test ride". The route looks like it would have been about 285 miles, but I called Kristine in East Elijay and got her to meet me in Blue Ridge, GA when I realized how far behind schedule I was. The plan was then for her to follow me the last 32 miles in order for her to practice her role as support crew chief for the 500 mile race. But when we met each other at the Arby's in Blue Ridge, there was a much more traffic than I expected. Blue Ridge was hopping. The traffic combined with me feeling tired and the kids trying to stay up until I made it to the cabin made me decide to end the ride early, hop in the car, and drive the last bit with Kristine back to the cabin. The kids were still awake and I got to see them to bed, which was definitely worth cutting the ride short, seeing how excited they were to show me things in the cabin.
That is how the ride ended, but the adventure started about 18 hours earlier at 1:30AM after having gone to bed at 10:30PM the night before. I set my alarm for 3 hours after going to bed hoping to hit two of the magic 90 minute sleep cycles, which seems to fit well with my own personal sleep pattern. By leaving this early, I was hoping to make it to Blairsville before sunset or at least before the kids went to bed. Another benefit of leaving this early is that I would be able to make it through all of Birmingham and surrounding communities long before most people had even gotten out of bed.
I started out doing essentially my normal commute route, which includes the Vesclub climb (at just over 700 vertical feet diff, one of the biggest climbs in Birmingham) so that I could compare it to later climbs on the route. Doing that climb meant I would also be in good position to blast down Hwy 31, continue through Homewood, and climb over Red Mountain on the Red Mountain Expressway without any traffic on the roads. I had two Axiom 200 watt lights, one mounted to the handlebars, and the other mounted on my helmet. I barely needed them riding through Birmingham, but once I made it out towards Trussville/Leeds on Floyd Bradford and Blackjack, lights were essential. The helmet light is great for scaring dogs – perfect for the route I had picked through dog-infested Annie Lee and Blackjack road. Simply put the helmet on highest setting, turn and stare at a dog, and it will stop dead in its tracks completely blinded by the light. As soon as you stop looking, it will normally start chasing again, but it is still better than nothing.
Hwy 11 through Springville was awesome given that there was no traffic – so awesome that as I was flying along the valley I missed the turn to take Washington Valley road towards Walker Gap. I backtracked at the next major road to get over to Walker Gap because there was no way I was not going to do that climb. On top of Walker, traffic started to pick up a bit as the farmers and really far-out commuters had to start driving at about 5AM. I flew down the waterfall descent and when I made the turn in the valley to head over to Chandler Mountain, this was by far the coldest part of my ride. The temp bottomed out around 27 degF but felt much colder given that I was dressed for the entire day with highs expected in the 50s. As it turns out, I was way overdressed for most of the ride given that temps peaked in the mid 60s. At this point of the ride, I was freezing.
80 miles into the ride, I stopped for the first time in Gadsden and ate a full breakfast at McDonald's. The police officer in line in front of me asked me where I was heading, and later a couple other guys who had eaten breakfast also wondered where I was heading. You could tell with all the equipment I was trying to recharge and all the food crammed into my backpack that I was heading a long distance. It was cold when I went into the McDonalds and already getting pretty hot by the time I left.
I did the very first new road for me about 82 or 83 miles into the ride climbing up onto Lookout Mountain via a rough chip/seal road called "Scenic Dr". I followed this road all the way along the north edge of Lookout Mountain with two KOM goals in mind – Keener Gap and Flanders Gap. I didn't know if these were already segments or not, but I was hoping Strava would auto-detect both as Cat 4 climbs. Both of these climbs are from the narrow US Hwy 11 valley floor back up to the Lookout Mountain ridge line. So to get to both of them, I had to first descend off the mountain to each of them.
Keener was paved and had some beautiful rock formations, one house, and a couple of dogs. I went down the descent way too fast for them to bother with me, but on the way back up as I was trying to put in an exactly threshold effort (not too hard, but not too easy either) here they come out of the house in the middle of the one switchback. Fortunately, they were friendly dogs and let me scoot on by. At the top of Keener Gap, I turned left to continue on Scenic Dr, which abruptly turns from chip/seal to dirt and gravel. The climb still continued on for another half mile or so. I really started to get excited about the ride as I was flying up the gravel road laughing giddily at how I'm trying to KOM a climb with miles and miles ahead of gravel in the middle of what I thought at the time would be a 300 mile ride. The road stayed Alabama dirt/gravel (graded and fast) for the next 5 miles to Flanders Gap. I flew down the gravel descent partly because it was really steep and I couldn't go much slower and partly because it was easy to see good lines. At the bottom, the dirt gravel gave way to some other kind of large gravel that was not easy to ride. I slowed way down to make sure I didn't pinch flat. I turned around at the train tracks (low spot in the valley) and headed back up to go for the KOM. I drilled it hard and the climb reminded me a lot of the Blockhouse Hill climb in the Rouge Roubaix race.
Unfortunately, neither climb auto-detected even though they were both well within Cat 4 range. I went back and created the segments and after waiting a few days, it looks like only one other person has done the paved Keener Gap climb, and nobody else has done the Flanders Gap climb. I turned around at the top of Flanders and headed back down it again so that I could take Hwy 11 across the valley to Collinsville. I wanted to do the climb out of Collinsville because on the map it had a lot of switchbacks (somewhat rare for Alabama). I was completely surprised by what I saw when I approached the climb from the streets in downtown. The climb was a powerline cut! The paved road switchbacked across the cut 4 or 5 times, putting the grade at a fairly consistent 10% and closer to 15% in the switchbacks.
At this point I needed to cut across Lookout Mountain and down the other side to head into Georgia. If I headed any farther north on Lookout Mountain, I would have gotten back into some really cool roads I've ridden before – but the eastern crossing of Georgia becomes problematic as there aren't as many roads that head across the many ridges that run north and south through that part of Georgia. So unfortunately I had to just barely brush by one of Alabama's Hidden treasure – Little River Canyon. I ended up doing a super fun descent from a firetower down to the entrance to the canyon – a national monument called Canyon Mouth.
I took a short break here before heading on some really awesome valley roads (Co Rd 58 and Co Rd 41) northeast through Cherokee County. Somewhere through here I crossed over into Georgia and continued on a northeastern track eventually reaching Summerville, Georgia. After a quick lunch at Subway, I headed back out towards the Narrows Picnic Rd (Hammond Gap) knowing that this would be dirt – Google street view car turned around exactly at the transition to dirt. It turns out that this was the roughest road of the route. I didn't have any problems on the climb, but on the long descent I had to go slow or run the very likely possibility of pinch flatting AND cutting my tires. We're talking ruts and large granite rocks sticking out of the ground.
Up to this point in the ride I had felt great, but after going so slow for so long and letting my heartrate dip too low, I suddenly realized that I was tired. Looking back at my heartrate data, I never did get my heartrate back up to what it was before that descent. The route between the bottom of the descent to Dalton started to pick up some heavy traffic including after school traffic, so even though it was some beautiful scenery – being tired and dealing with a lot of cars doesn't make for a fun ride. One highlight was a smaller road just before the start of the Pinhotti climb. That climb was very steep and VERY busy with traffic. Fortunately, there was a nice clean shoulder to ride to the top. I debated about just heading on down the mountain, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to climb all the way up to the towers. This dirt climb is the final descent on the Snake Creek Gap mountain bike time trial course. It was a blast to climb (and clear!) on the road bike, and not too bad coming down either.
Dalton was a traffic disaster as I hit it during rush hour. Even with a stop for dinner at Arby's, traffic was still bad at about 6PM as I made my way over to Fort Mountain on GA-52. What a nasty road. Drivers were all pretty courteous, no honking or throwing things, but they passed you close, definitely not 3 feet. As soon as I left the town of Chatsworth, the traffic immediately disappeared. The climb up Fort Mountain was beautiful and mostly deserted. There were a few fast motorcycles, but you could hear them coming from a long ways away. I stopped and chatted briefly with three of the riders I caught up to at the overlook near the top. I did the climb pretty slowly, but was surprised that at 215 miles into the ride not to be struggling with cramps or any other problems.
I was hoping for a long 35+mph downhill for miles and miles, but instead the descent was very punchy with half-mile climbs and only lasted a few miles. After bottoming out, the road started climbing again. The sun had set a while ago so I put my lights back on and called Kristine to let her know I was running way behind schedule. This takes us back to the beginning of the post where she met me in Blue Ridge and instead of following me for the last 32 miles, I decided to just call it a day and ride in the car back to our cabin for the next few days. 253 miles instead of 285, but I got everything I needed to get out of the ride in terms of prep for the 500 mile race, and I also had quite the adventure!
After this ride, I took Tuesday off and then had two more fun adventure rides Wednesday and Thursday. Here are a few pictures from those adventures.
Family atop the Brasstown Bald lookout tower. I beat them to the top, but I did have a 3.5 hour head start. Wednesday.
View of the Woody Gap climb from standing below the firetower at the very top of the mountain. Click to enlarge.
March 29-30th – Grant ups and downs – Hell of the South weekend
As I mentioned earlier, this year's Hell of the South was extra epic, but Mark Fisher and I tried to outdo it the next day by conquering all 11 ways up the Grant plateau plus 4 additional climbs on the way back including one of the steepest climbs in Alabama for a grand total of 15 Huntsville Cat 3 climbs. Some of the climbs are rated Cat 4 based on where the segment starts, but they all have enough vertical diff to be made into Cat 3 climbs using a slightly different starting or ending point along our route. Huntsville has the perfect topography for hard training – lots of flat roads punctuated by 2-3 mile super steep climbs. This also makes for some fun descending. Check out that amazing topography in the two maps below. Double-click (or click once to load the large image and then click again to zoom your browser into the image) to see all the details and mountain names.
11 ways to climb the Grant plateau (click to enlarge, click twice to zoom really far in). The climbs up Grant are numbered.
11 ways up the Grant plateau plus the rest of our ride. All the climbs are numbered starting with the Green Mountain climb, then all 11 ways up Grant, followed by Blowing Cave, Tony Wilmur Trail, and finally Cecil Ashburne. Click to enlarge. After your browser downloads the image, click it again to zoom in and see the details.
I am working on a separate blog with a catalog of the 11 ways up grant plus the bonus climbs of Green, Blowing Cave, Tony Wilmur, and Cecil Ashburne, but I have a feeling it might be a while before I can finish it. So I'm just going to put in a teaser here with the Green Mountain front-side climb, the Swearengin climb, and the Blowing Cave climb (quite possibly one of the steepest paved climbs of measurable category in Alabama).
GREEN MOUNTAIN - FRONT SIDE Dist: 1.87 mi (0:14:36) Climbing: 886 ft Min Avg Max DFPM Pow 81 270.6 391 W Gravity -16 231.2 354 W Speed 5.2 7.7 13.7 mi/h Elev 578 1026 1468 ft Slope -0.4 9.04 19.2 % Caden 49 67.1 109 rpm HR 95 143.5 158 bpm NP:288W IF:0.98 TSS:24 VI:1.06 3/30/2014 8:06 AM 40 degF; 1022 mbar
SWEARENGIN CLIMB Dist: 1.61 mi (0:12:17) Climbing: 640 ft Min Avg Max DFPM Pow 19 246.9 385 W Gravity -48 201.2 372 W Speed 4.9 7.9 14.3 mi/h Wind 0.0 8.1 24.0 mi/h Elev 591 887 1244 ft Slope -1.0 7.70 19.4 % Caden 30 66.0 99 rpm HR 112 142.1 157 bpm NP:267W IF:0.91 TSS:17 VI:1.08 3/30/2014 11:41 AM 62 degF; 1020 mbar
BLOWING CAVE (COMPLETE CLIMB) Note: I was super tired and weaved up the climb. Dist: 1.73 mi (0:14:04) Climbing: 751 ft Min Avg Max DFPM Pow 0 251.5 451 W Gravity -387 202.8 417 W Speed 3.3 7.4 19.4 mi/h Wind 0.0 6.5 25.9 mi/h Elev 725 1122 1470 ft Slope -7.3 8.28 23.6 % Caden 34 60.2 112 rpm HR 120 141.2 157 bpm NP:282W IF:0.96 TSS:22 VI:1.12 3/30/2014 3:06 PM 65 degF; 1019 mbar
BLOWING CAVE - STEEP CAT 4 section only From a 2013 ride when I went straight up the climb. Dist: 0.29 mi (0:04:06) Energy: 74.7 kJ Cals Burn: 71.4 kcal Climbing: 300 ft Min Avg Max Power 187 303.6 398 W Gravity 189 284.2 372 W Speed 3.1 4.3 6.8 mi/h Wind 0.0 2.4 7.1 mi/h Elev 27 187 329 ft Slope 13.2 20.23 26.8 % HR 141 149.0 155 bpm NP:311W IF:1.05 TSS:8 VI:1.02 2/10/2013 10:03 AM 51 degF; 990 mbar
iBike data for the Green Mountain front side climb (click to enlarge)
iBike data for possibly Alabama's steepest Cat 4 climb – note the >20% average slope (click to enlarge)
iBike data for the Swearengin climb up to the Grant plateau (click to enlarge)
Winter Gridlock 2014 – a pictoral timeline
In this blog, I document the events of the surprise snowstorm that hit central Alabama on Tuesday, January 28th, 2014. I have selected several defining pictures to show full size here at the beginning to capture the chaos caused by the storm and its aftermath. Below the full-sized pictures, I have included small thumbnails of some of the videos I uploaded to youtube. Below the videos, I have organized a long pictoral gallery that covers the entire week. There are a ton of pictures, but I recommend that you click on the first one to open a full-size window and then click the arrows or click the picture to advance from photo to photo. If you do that, then when you make it to the end of the
Below I have created a pictoral timeline of events based on photo timestamps. I have combined what was originally two galleries into one large gallery. Click on the first picture in the gallery and you can advance through each picture at full-size with the captions displayed at the bottom.
Monday – Friday
Wrapping up the year with the Festive 500
Finished #festive500 yesterday in the dark with temp down to -22.4 degF. Not ashamed to admit some tears were shed towards the end… perhaps this is how Andy Hampsten felt on that epic day in the 1988 giro. I have finished atop the leaderboard in several Strava challenges, but I am more proud of finishing 4,992nd in this year's Festive 500 than any of the ones I have finished 1st.
Each year for the past several years, Rapha has sponsored a challenge to ride 500km (310 miles) from December 24th – December 31st, inclusive. Since I normally ride close to 400 miles per week, this is well within my normal riding range. But our tradition is to leave Alabama on Christmas day and drive 1100 miles north to Shell Lake, Wisconsin to visit my wife's family. This makes the Festive 500 especially challenging because of the winter weather in northwestern Wisconsin. Temperature and road conditions vary from year to year, so some years are easier than others. Here is the day-by-day adventure that was the 2013 Festive 500.
Day 1 – 12/24/2013 Birmingham, AL brick alley 2x plus climbing
12/24 – my two bikes after riding home from brick alley
Summary – I wanted to scope out the S Cove Dr climb and try to hit 2.5 million feet of climbing for the year so I stayed close to home and did a bunch of repeats on the Green Valley roller coaster. I also needed to pick up my mtb from Craig at Brick Alley. He was putting some mineral oil brakes on my bike and changing out the tires to the widest tire he had in the shop (2.25″ Tiagos) to get ready for my trip to Wisconsin. I stopped by, picked up the bike, and pushed it the three miles home while riding my road bike.
|12/24/2013 at 12:06pm Birmingham, AL brick alley 2x plus climbing
|Average temp
|36 degF
|45.9 mi
|Moving time
|10,299 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|13.1/54.4 mph
Day 2 – 12/25/2013 Birmingham, AL strava shootout finale – s cove dr
12/25 – S Cove Dr – 25% max gradient
Summary – For the last three months of the year, some of us climbing addicts in Birmingham participate in the Strava Shootout, where we pick a climb each week and the fastest time up the climb that week wins that week. http://topocreator.com/shootout – the final climb of the year this year is the super steep s cove dr very close to my house. It climbs 222 feet in just 0.2 miles averaging just under 20% with a max gradient of 25%. I hyperventilated and couldn't get enough air after the effort last year b/c it is so long at the intensity required to put in a good time … imagine a good solid 1'30" sprint at 600 watts. This year my legs were pretty dead from a really long ride two weeks prior and then a 508 mile week the following week. So my shootout effort was 5 seconds lower than my best time on the climb, and I could tell b/c I wasn't hyperventilating as bad this year. I warmed up by heading out to Mountain Brook and doing some climbing.
|12/25/2013 at 9:45am Birmingham, AL strava shootout finale – s cove dr
|Average temp
|39 degF
|30.1 mi
|Moving time
|4,895 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|14.2/50.6 mph
Days 3 (12/26) and 4 (12/27) – Travel
1107 miles and 30 inches of snow later, we arrived in Wisconsin
1107 miles from AL to WI
We left Birmingham at about 2 in the afternoon and drove straight through the night 1107 miles north to Wisconsin. There was some nasty freezing fog on I-65 near La Fayette, Indiana so we got off the interstate and headed west ending up taking some dirt roads which were much easier to drive on. Nearly 23 hours later, we arrived in Shell Lake, WI at about 1 in the afternoon.
Day 5 – 12/28/2013 Shell Lake, WI heartwood snow riding
12/28 – shell lake to heartwood via slushy muddy roads
Various road conditions on the route from Shell Lake to Heartwood
Summary – this was by far my warmest ride in Wisconsin, but it was so warm that there was a lot of water on the roads (salted/sanded). I ended up getting soaked, muddy, and cold by the time I made it from Shell Lake to Heartwood about 30 miles north where we were spending a couple nights in a rental cabin. I took a circuitous route on some new dirt roads I'd never ridden before. Most of the roads were wet or slushy, but the really rural dirt roads were still pretty good snow pack for riding. By the time I made it to the Heartwood resort cabin area, the snow was super soft and had been driven on a lot so it was nearly impossible to ride. I persisted at an average speed of about 5mph for the last 3 miles of the ride arriving at the cabin just after sunset.
|12/28/2013 at 11:09am Shell Lake, WI heartwood snow riding
|Average temp
|30 degF
|63.7 mi
|Moving time
|2,112 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|13.4/28.6 mph
Day 6 – 12/29/2013 Trego, WI long day in the cold
First cold ride, little did I know how much colder it was going to get.
Long day in the cold – very cold after sunset!
Summary – we woke up to really cold temps, and I figured I would go out early and then split my ride up into two rides. But by the time I made it to Minong, I was so cold I spent well over an hour warming up at a gas station and decided to do everything in one ride. Riding in the snow was much better this day because it was so cold that everything was frozen together into hard snow instead of slippery loose snow. Webb Creek road on the way over to Minong was awesome, a super fast snowy road with some good hills and a beautiful frozen lake. I stopped back by our cabin after 45 miles and watched the first quarter of the Packers game while warming back up. I wanted to head back out for at least 15 more miles in the dark, but my headlight wasn't showing the snow clear enough to take good lines, and it got really really cold very quickly … almost -18 degF by the end of the ride.
|12/29/2013 at 9:56am Trego, WI long day in the cold
|Average temp
|-8 degF
|56.9 mi
|Moving time
|3,510 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|12.7/28.0 mph
Day 7 – 12/30/2013 Trego, WI cold ride home to shell lake
Walrus tusk after a long day in the cold.
Scenes from the beginning of my ride in the cold. Immediately after taking the leftmost pic, my phone gave me a "critical battery" warning and then cut off before I could even click OK. This was less than an hour into the ride, starting with a full charge! You could hear the snowplow coming from at least half a mile away. The right picture is an ice fishing road on a frozen lake. The day before there was a pickup truck out on the lake.
Summary – at one point on this ride, I was on a heavily snowed logging road and got passed by three big logging trucks. My feet were so painfully cold, and I was counting down the miles to Trego – the first place I could stop to warm up. I was so out of it that I didn't realize one of the trucks was behind me. He never blew his horn, but just sat there about 50 meters behind me until I realized that what I was hearing was not my tires in the snow but rather the engine of the truck. I immediately got out of the way so that he could get around me. Why was I so cold? The overnight temperature where we were near Minong was -36 degF. Yes, that is 36 degrees below zero air temperature. It did warm-up fairly quickly: -28 degF by sunrise, -20 degF for Kristine's ski, and then -15 degF by the time I left to bike back to Shell Lake. Long before I made it to Trego (25 miles into the ride), my phone was completely dead, which was sad because I ate and warmed up at this really cool restaurant called the Dinner Bell. Since I couldn't get any pictures, I saved it all to memory and then wrote it up here in a short picture-less blog here: A cold day in Wisconsin. Towards the end of this ride, as it started to get dark and snow on the really rural road I was on b/t spooner and shell lake, I wondered a few times if I had bit off more than I could chew. I wasn't cold, per se, but my toes were killing me from the cold, and I was having a hard time seeing with the fading light and the light snow.
|12/30/2013 at 11:14am Trego, WI cold ride home to shell lake
|Average temp
|-9 degF
|49.6 mi
|Moving time
|2,927 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|13.2/25.9 mph
Final Day – 12/31/2013 Trego, WI meteor hill epic
Three separate frozen beards for this final ride to finish the festive 500. Keep in mind that the ice was completely melted between warming stops, so those are new frozen beards each time! The first one was at my first warming stop 1 hour 47 minutes into the ride without stopping. The middle one has two walrus tusks! Kristine took the last one when I called her to come get me with only a few miles to make it back to the house.
Summary – without a doubt this was one of the toughest rides I've ever done. Not many rides have ever brought me to tears by the end, but this one did. I needed 104k to finish the 500km for the Festive 500 challenge so I knew it was going to be tough. I had originally figured I would split it up into two 33 mile rides, but it was so cold in the morning (-20 degF) that I wanted to let it warm up a bit before starting, which meant doing it all in one ride. The past few years I've included Meteor Hill (at 1800 ft, the highest point in northwestern wisconsin) in at least one ride and it would work out to be just under 70 miles roundtrip … so I thought "let's go for it!"
The first place to stop on my route was Birchwood, 25 miles and 1:47 away from Shell Lake. The toe warmers I bought at the BP shown in the video below were complete duds and I was in some pain for the last 11 miles into Birchwood. Fortunately, there were two couples riding snowmobiles on the trail that paralleled Co Rd D. I raced them for a couple miles and this not only distracted me from the cold, but also warmed up my internal temp helping out my extremeties a bit. I ended up beating them to the spot where the trail left the road b/c they were going slow and their trail wound a bit. Also, I had a tailwind for much of the ride to Birchwood. But even with all that I was wondering if I was going to arrive at the gas station with some serious frostbite.
The small gas station was cold and very busy so after eating some pizza and drinking a little bit of coffee, I decided to try to find someplace warmer. Just down the street was the Birchwood Cafe, a really warm diner where I could relax. The manager (owner?), Sandy, thought I was with the 150 mile Tuscobia winter ultra adventure race/run/ski/ride that had started on Saturday. Just so you know, I'm not the only one riding a bike up here. Most of those people were on fat bikes going much slower so they didn't have to deal quite as much with the windchill, but I'm not sure if they had as many places to stop and warm-up as I did. Plus, they were definitely working harder and kudos to all of them. I may have to try it next year, as it is a qualifier for the Iditarod Trail Race, and I ended up riding 240 miles over the same timeframe as the race (if there were still people riding it on New Year's Eve).
The climb up meteor hill starts right outside of town. Last year I went up the paved state highway and came down the snowmobile trail. That is not very efficient b/c you have to go slower on the downhill than the uphill. So this year I decided to do the climb on the snowmobile trail and then come back down on the state highway. I knew this would be bitterly cold on the descent, but I also knew that raw time in the cold was a factor – so better to suck it up and get the ride back to the gas station done as quickly as possible. The snowmobile trail / road was beautiful and I got to follow some bunny tracks for a while, which are really fun to see the two sets of paw prints close together followed by another set at the next landing spot. My phone was still working, but I was way too cold to stop. I did stop once towards the bottom of the climb but this was before the bunny tracks, and I wasn't going to stop again.
The descent back down from the top was long, gradual, and bitterly cold into a stiff headwind. I don't even want to write about it. Fortunately, I knew that there was a gas station waiting at the bottom back in Birchwood. I was running out of daylight and knew that most of the ride back to Shell Lake would be into a headwind so I didn't stop as long this time, but I did buy more toe warmers. I put two warmers in each foot (one on the top and one on the bottom), drank another cup of coffee, and took off barely 30 minutes after arriving.
I pushed the pace really hard leaving Birchwood with an average heartrate of 155bpm for 45 minutes all the way to Long Lake. I didn't want to be out on the snowy/icy roads on New Year's Eve. I relaxed a bit once I made it through Long Lake, where Co Rd D was a lot less icy, more wide open, and straighter. At this point the temperature, really started to plummet from about -14 in Long Lake to -20 a few miles later. Also, my Garmin battery switched over to the "yellow" low zone. In these temps, I didn't know how much time that would give me so I just drilled it again as hard as I could. I watched the temp drop 0.1 degF every few seconds for several miles until it hit -20 right as the sun was setting. Even with the risk of time, battery, and cold, I had to stop and get a pic of the sunset and my Garmin.
Sunset on the final day, plus my Garmin showing -20 degF with my Nokia Lumia 1020 in the background.
Quick note about my equipment – you can see in the bottom pic my "mineral oil" brakes. They worked flawlessly in the cold the entire time. My Garmin held up for huge chunks of time in temps as low as 22 degF below zero. Towards the end of this final ride, the Garmin started ghosting. When I swiped between screens, it wasn't as spontaneous as normal and the screen seemed to have two images on it for a fraction of a second. The total battery life looked like it would be about 7.5 hours which is at least 3 hours less than it owuld be in normal temps. My phone did not handle the cold as well. It lasted about an hour from a full charge before shutting off. My contour video camera lasted even less than an hour on the final day with only a few minutes of recording during that time. Shifting didn't work up front, but worked fine in the back. The other big surprise for me was the cassette not engaging the freewheel, you had to do a really slow pedal revolution to give the clamps enough time to spring back up. This got really bad towards the end as it took a while to get it to engage.
Back to the ride, when I started up the long gradual hill from Co Rd D, it was still into a stiff headwind. The temperature was dropping fast. My Garmin battery was dying. I was getting tired but too cold to try to eat anything. And I had nothing to drink that was not frozen. I still had almost 9 miles to get to the 65 miles I needed to complete the challenge. Each new uphill into the wind, I thought you've got to be kidding me. There is no way I'm going to make it before either my legs or my Garmin gives out. My feet were really cold, and my hands were really cold but it didn't matter. I just wanted to make it to 65 miles. Finally, I made it, stopped the Garmin and reset it (which saves the file), and called Kristine to come pick me up. I only had a few miles left to make it back to the house so I kept riding as she was driving towards me. By this point with the adrenaline gone from trying to make it to 65 miles and with the temp at -22 degF, I was cold – very cold. There was no way for me to get the wheels off the bike to get it into the car so we decided it would be better for me just to ride behind her slowly "heatpacing" at 15 mph which got me the final 2.7 miles of the way home for a total of 68.1 miles on the day.
|12/31/2013 at 10:30am Trego, WI meteor hill epic
|Average temp
|-11 degF
|68.1 mi
|Moving time
|3,773 ft
|Elapsed time
|Speed (avg/max)
|14.6/27.5 mph
Finally, here's some videos I got on the final day before my contour camera died. And before that, here is the Garmin connect stats showing the temperature graph bottoming out at -22.4 degF after sunset.
Festive 500 finishing ride stats
A cold day in Wisconsin
This is going to be a picture-less post … for the TLDR (too long, didn't read) crowd, here's a quick summary: it was really cold last night at the cabin we were staying in near Minong, WI. -36 degF to be exact! Kristine went skiing in the morning when the temp warmed up to near -20 degF. I left to bike back to Shell Lake when the temp was up to about -15 degF. My phone died about an hour into the ride, even though I had started with a mostly full battery and left it in airplane mode. Inspiration for this post came while I was eating lunch at the Dinner Bell restaurant in Trego phoneless and unable to take any pictures of the numerous scenes and objects I wanted to remember. Continuing the ride after lunch, I finished just as it was getting dark and starting to snow a bit more heavily – five hours after I had started with an average temp of -9 degF making it truly a cold day in Wisconsin.
Here's the longer version for those who want the details and word pictures substituing for the digital pictures I couldn't take with my dead phone. At about 6 in the morning, Kristine nudged me awake to show me current conditions for Trego, WI which is about 15 miles south of where we were staying. It was -34.8 degF. This was shocking as the predicted overnight low was only in the low -20s. By the time, we got moving it was nearly 7:30AM and I threw on just a few clothes to run outside and get a picture of the sunrise. I was outside for three maybe four minutes max, and I came running back into the cabin chilled to the bones and with a frosty beard.
Just over an hour later, Kristine was out the door to go for a ski in what was about -20 degF temp by this point. She was gone for just over an hour and came back with her face and hair covered in frost, eyelashes, eyebrows, cheeks white with frost. After helping pack up the car, I took off on what I hoped would be a 60 mile ride back to the Cardwell house in Shell Lake, WI about 30 miles south of the cabin. It was cold with the wind coming out of the west. Whenever I was heading east, you could feel a noticeable rise in the perceived temperature. But as soon as I turned south or sometimes even west, the windchill was awfully cold and you could feel threw layers of clothing a drop in the temp.
I was trying new chemical warmers and they worked really well for about 45 minutes, but then they lose air circulation which is required to keep the chemical reaction happening. It's too much of a hassle to try to take your shoes off to let some air into the warmers, but taking pictures helped keep air in my glove warmers. Then my phone died a dramatic "good-bye" windows phone death with a "critical battery" message flashing very briefly before the phone simply went blank. At this point, I was cold, not just my hands and feet which were painfully cold, but my core, my legs. The only body parts not cold were my arms for some reason. It was funny how one body part would start to ache and that would drown out pain messages from other body parts. I'd work on that part by wiggling my toes, stomping on the pedals, wiggling or clapping my hands, and then as that body part warmed, another one would take its place in sending the dominant pain signal.
The closest gas station on my route was in Trego, about 25 miles into my ride, and I knew that would be a stretch to make it there without any intermediate warmup spots. And it was. At one point, I was on a snow covered logging road thinking, "this is stupid cold", "come on brian, get it together and pedal dammit". I was on the road I had taken north just two days earlier when the temperature was an amazing 40 degrees warmer (about 30 degF), and I laughed as I went by some of the places I had stopped to take pictures. Even if my phone had been working, there was no way I would have stopped.
Finally making it to Trego, WI, I found a really cool restaurant called the Dinner Bell where I could warm-up for an hour and refuel. Here I was hoping I could plugin my phone to my solar battery pack and get it to cut back on to instagram some pictures, but the phone just sat there dead. I decided to take in as much as I could and write it later so here goes – first as you approached the restaurant there was a real well (but non-functional) outside with a dinner bell on top of the cross beam. It said "make a wish" at the dinner bell. I was thinking "I wish it was warmer".
I parked my bike against the well and went inside. Once inside, I sat in a booth and stripped off gloves and shoes to let some blood flow back down into very cold appendages. The waitress gave me coffee immediately, and I ordered breakfast for lunch. I ordered biscuits and gravy and a second meal of pancakes. She brought out the two huge plates full of food and I told her "good thing I'm very hungry". It was probably well over 1000 calories worth of a food, but I ate it all and then took off across the street to try to buy a little usb wall charger. For $5, I got a wall charger and plugged in my phone but after a few minutes of nothing, I decided to just try to head on as fast as I could back to Shell Lake so Kristine wouldn't worry since I couldn't call her.
In retrospect, I should have borrowed a phone and called anyway because it ended up being nearly two hours to finish the rest of the ride (I was imagining maybe just over an hour). Four hours after I made it back, I finally got the phone to turn back on doing a reset by holding all the buttons down for 10 seconds. I thought this would hard reset the phone, but fortunately it just cut it back on and all my data and pics from earlier were still there. Whew. It was a cold day in Wisconsin.
A little bit of arctic adventure in the deep south
I took this picture of my frozen beard about 3 hours into my attempt to ride from Nashville home to Birmingham. I was actually quite warm except for my feet, which were very, very cold.
Everything was fitting together perfectly for me to attempt this epic ride from Nashville, TN back home to Birmingham, AL. Kristine and I had tickets to see Andrew Peterson's "Behold the Lamb" Christmas concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. We had a fun date night together and with my cousins Richard and Christy who live in Franklin. After the concert we hung out with our friends who had also driven up from Birmingham from the concert. By the time Kristine and I had made it back to our hotel, and by the time I got everything ready for my early departure in the morning it was 12:30AM.
Waiting for the Behold the Lamb concert to start at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN
I toyed briefly with the idea of just starting my ride home right then rather than sleeping at all, but there were still a lot of cars on the road at midnight when we were driving to the hotel. I felt it was safer to let the streets clear out completely before departing so I ended up setting the alarm for 3:30AM to get exactly three hours of sleep. I was wide awake when the alarm went off, but despite having tried to get as much stuff together as possible before sleeping, it took me 30 minutes to get all my clothes on, eat, and get out the door at nearly exactly 4AM on what I was hoping would be a 14.5 hour, 250 mile ride home to Birmingham.
Annotated temperature graph pretty much tells the story of the ride.
I knew it was going to be cold for an extended period of time, but I was imagining temps closer to 20 degF than 10 degF! Even with the crazy temps (see the temperature graphs above), I was doing just fine everywhere except for my feet. I had thick insulated neoprene booties on, but even with loose shoes and as much blood circulation as possible, my feet just couldn't stay warm. I had meant to grab some of the chemical warming packs to throw in my shoes but I had forgotten them at home, and I figured most gas stations in Tennessee are not going to carry them. If I had been in Wisconsin, I could have stopped at the next gas station and bought a couple of the chemical warmers for a dollar or two and been on my merry way.
Instead, I tried every trick of the trade to keep my feet warm – including the following:
- Following the old standby rule – "if you are cold, just ride harder".
- Riding hard while standing and focusing on pulling my feet up rather than pushing them down – forces more blood down into your feet, the more inefficient and erratic the movement the better.
- Riding downhill with the brakes on while still pedaling hard – anything to minimize windchill and maximize blood circulation.
- Adding in as many steep hills as I could find – benefit of reducing windchill and increasing heartrate.
Even with all of those tricks, I was seriously contemplating calling Kristine to meet me in Lewisburg and abandon the ride after only 70 miles or so. But not too long after the sunrise, temps started to rise pretty rapidly all the way to the 20s by Lewisburg. The best thing was stumbling upon the donut shop with a heater I stood in front of for nearly an hour while drinking coffee and trying to warm up.
Lewisburg donut shop – I spent an hour in here warming up after four hours of riding in the cold.
I had ridden in Lewisburg earlier this year, so I left the donut shop warmed up and on familiar roads. I made some great time between here and Fayetteville with some good climbs, warming temps, and a stiff north wind (tailwind). It was funny to be so cold before the donut shop and then to be sweating on a lot of the steep hills just a couple hours later. The section of US-64 was nice, but stressful even with a huge clean shoulder to ride on. On top of being stressfull, it was rather boring with very few turns and lots of long gradual climbs and descents. I struggled with "sleepy fatigue" through here as I was also probably crashing a bit from the caffeine and sugar from the donut shop.
I turned in Fayetteville and headed due south on a section of US-231 that was terrible with a very narrow shoulder and a lot of traffic. Fortunately, I turned off of it after a few miles and found some more beautiful backroads that gradually flattened until they were basically pancake flat by the time I hit the Alabama border. I had also ridden some of these roads once before so it was encouraging to be making great time and to be on somewhat familiar roads.
Unfortunately, my math brain was doing a lot of calculating through here and I had worked out a 10:30PM arrival in Birmingham at my current pace. This was somewhat discouraging as that was FOUR HOURS longer than I had planned. Kristine wanted to pick me up in Cullman, but I convinced her to let me ride to Cahaba Cycles Trussville, which would knock an hour and a half off the ride all the way back to our house in Hoover. That was the plan when I stopped at a waffle house off of US-72. Rejuvenated, I blazed through Huntsville at a decent clip but managed to hit a lot of school traffic and then by the time I made it all the way down to the Tennessee River bridge, I was picking up some early rush hour traffic. The road was really dangerous with stretches of nice shoulder followed inexplicably by long quarter mile sections of road with ZERO shoulder. The white line was right up against the grass. I spent a few miles trying to time the packs of cars coming up behind me (based on the traffic light before the bridge) perfectly with the shoulder. No close calls but I did bail off the road into the grass a couple of times when I didn't get my timing right. I just did not trust the eighteen wheelers and the people driving 65+ mph. Definitely the most dangerous stretch of road for the trip and probably one of the top dangerous roads in Alabama in my opinion. (And I have ridden a LOT of roads in Alabama).
The climb itself was a good one with a nice fairly clean shoulder somewhat akin to the US-280 climb from Lee Branch heading east towards Chelsea for those of you in Birmingham who may have done that climb – except the US-231 climb is a bit steeper climbing an extra 150 feet compared to the US-280 climb. I turned at the top onto Apple Grove road and followed this forever … eventually hitting this year's Alabama state road race course overlapping with it from the four way stop at the church all the way down past the steep descent. Instead of following the race course, I continued on through the descent and up the next hill continuing on this road for quite a while. There was one super steep cat 4 climb http://app.strava.com/activities/99939588#2138520004 that I was really thankful for after a stretch of flat roads. It had a section that was 0.3 miles long at 13% – I hit this at about 175 miles into my ride after sunset but before it got too dark to see without my light. At the top of this section, I decided to call Kristine and move up the "pick-up" spot from Cahaba Cycles Trussville to the bottom of Skyball. I was getting cold, the dogs were getting bad, and my recalculations had me arriving in Trussville closer to midnight as my pace started to slow.
This was the worst stretch of road as far as dogs went. It was one dog or group of dogs chasing me at what seemed like every house / trailer along the next set of county roads. I knew there would be some small roads and lots of potential dog problems along the entire route, but it really was just the county roads in southern Morgan County and Cullman County that were full of unchained, unfenced dogs. I tried being friendly with the dogs and most of them were fine, but then it started to get annoying. Fortunately, it was dark by this point and I kept my light on high-beam to blind the dogs. This was pretty effective as shining my light in the dogs' eyes would without fail stop the dog dead in its track. My only guess is that the light is bright enough to temporarily blind/hurt/scare the dogs.
Tour de Cullman wooden plank bridge
Skyball kom line – tour de cullman race finish
Passing east of Cullman I bee-lined it for the Tour de Cullman route arriving at this familiar bridge. I climbed sky ball at a snail's pace, but I knew Kristine was waiting for me at the other side of the hill. Even though I was really disappointed not to make it all the way home, I was very happy to have climbed sky ball. At the top as I was taking pictures, my light died! Fortunately, there was a full moon so I'm 45% sure I could have ridden the rest of the way home in the dark as I ended up descending Skyball with no light at close to 30mph. That's how bright the moon was! Still, I'm thankful that the light died as it gave me another great excuse to hop right in the car when I found Kristine at the blinky light intersection where I had directed her to meet me.
What an adventure! Next time I'm going to make it!!
Here's all the pictures that I took during the ride.