1 Million v. 15+ Million
On Saturday morning, May 11, I left Congress, AZ, at 4:00am and followed route 89 and 89A up Yarnell Grade, over the White Spars to Prescott, up Mingus Mountain, through Jerome, down to about 8 miles past Cottonwood ... and back to Congress the same way.
About 19,000 feet of climbing, 190 miles, one million `feet.'
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http://www.3000milestoacure.com) as Maria Paker will be racing 3000 miles in the Race Across America. In fact, Maria will be racing
15,840,000 feet to raise money for brain cancer research.
THAT is an inspiration .)
No mishaps. Completed the course about 3 hours longer than I had anticipated for a completion in 20:25:00.
There was a stiff NNE 20-30 mphheadwind the entire outleg of the course. While ascending Yarnell Grade the wind coming NNE and the variable terrain created swirls, gusts and crosswinds that were easily into the 35+ mph range. I was pushed by one of the gusts into the guardrail. THAT has never happened before.
It's one thing to ride into a headwind. It's altogether worse to wrestle with capricious crosswinds. The only area where the headwinds and crosswinds were somewhat mitigated was on the ascent from the south up to the top of Mingus Mountain. Descending MM exposed me to the NNE wind and crosswinds again.
On the return leg it was a major relief to have either no wind or a tailwind. But it made climbing up to the top of MM from Clarkdale that much hotter. I'll take `hot' over a withering crosswind any day, though.
The battery on my Garmin 500 started to get `low' after about 17 hours so I started up my Garmin 200 to pick up the data for the remainder of the course.
Again, no mishaps. But a reminder as to the necessity for maintaining good nutrition and hydration became apparent as I was ascending MM from the north. I began to feel `empty.' I recognized this as low blood sugar. At the top of MM I changed from wet clothes to dry clothes, ate a sandwich of peanut butter, mayonnaise, tuna fish and pickles (tastes pretty good) and drank a can of V8. Took a 3-5 minute nap. And, stowed a 24 oz bottle of concentrated maltodextrin and protein in the bottle holder. That pretty much ended the feeling `empty' problem. In fact, I felt like I was consuming kerosene for the rest of the course.
My good friend Mike Cash made all the difference. I simply could not have completed this in the time it took without him. He drove a crew vehicle starting just after Prescott Valley for the rest of the course (about 12.5 hours). That allowed me to unload extra weight: clothes, spare tire, tubes, tools, food, etc, and climb much lighter (about 10 lbs?).
The various Garmin type instruments are, in my opinion, wildly variable as regards feet climbed. Example: Garmin Connect had me climbing just over 13,000 feet. Even though the previous weekend I did 107 miles in half the time and the Garmin recorded 13,000 feet that time. The ridewithgps had me climbing just short of 19,000 feet for the same distance. My `internal' sense of climbing puts it at between 18,000 - 20,000 feet of climbing.
Here are the ridewithgps data:
http://ridewithgps.com/trips/1314690
http://ridewithgps.com/trips/1314729
I think this route would be a great 300K or double century. Plenty of places to get water and food along the way. I like the fact that on the mountains vehicles are going slower because of the many, many sharp switchbacks.
Again, I'm very grateful to Mike Cash for doing solo crew for this course. He made ALL the difference.
