Craig and Teal Buchi told me about this ride a couple of years ago and Beth Johnson also recommended it.
It is a little early in the year and they want to get the cyclists out of the way before the marathon starts, so they start the ride at 6am when it is still pretty dark. Thankfully the temperature was pretty nice. There was some fairly strong wind. But, the course is generally downhill with a loss of 575 feet over 25 miles, so I figured it would be fast.
I tried to get together with the Buchis and Jeff Barton to do this ride. But, we didn't hook up. Either way I was going to have to get up early. So I took an ambien and went to bed about 9:30pm. I woke up pretty alert at about 4am out of the blue. After thinking for a while and not feeling very sleepy. I decided to get up and ride up to the U instead of drive.
When I rode last Saturday I went partway up Suncrest. I am such a wimp I didn't even make it to the hardest part. Still farther than I have gone. All the way down I was on my brakes. I guess that wasn't good because last night the cables pulled and loosened the binding screws. I am so glad that didn't happen while descending Suncrest. I tried to repair by rerouting the cables counterclockwise around the screws so it would have a tendency to tighten rather than loosen the screws. However, this severely changes the pulling angle and greatly affects the leverage. I figured this out only shortly into the ride to the Bike Tour start. So I stopped to re-fix. So, I arrived at the start of the ride with about five minutes to spare.
I tried not to push too hard. most of the way there I had a tailwind. I didn't want to start at the back of the pack so I pushed my way into the middle. I wanted to try to call Craig or Jeff. But, didn't feel I had the time. As it was they were late and just exiting the LDS Institute parking lot as we came by. When the ride started, I had about 1:40 or almost a quarter of a mile before I was able to get up to a decent speed because of the crowd and slow riders. I should have arrived earlier and gotten closer to the front of the pack. They said there were about 1900 riders.
Once we got going I felt good and picked out a guy to tail. This was "not a race" and we weren't supposed to draft. But it became apparent pretty quick that a lot of us were racing and drafting. I lost my lead rider when we turned off Foothill to get over to 21st East because he just bombed the downhill. I took it a little easy. We couldn't really see the road well for the first 30 minutes or so. I caught up to him again and really for the most of the rest of the ride he and another guy were in the group I was with.
I would get a little tired but then regain my strength, and just kept thinking I only had to make it to Cotton Bottom because then the wind was at our backs. And boy was I right. After we turned north, we just flew, probably going 27-28 most of the time. Occasionally I felt our group should be going faster. But, then I couldn't even take the lead let alone go off the front. Amateur. I hit one pothole hard that made my handlebars rotate to a lower position. One fellow got slightly stuck in a groove in the road. He didn't get into too much trouble. Another guy right in front of me hit a pothole and went this way and that before regaining control. A few moments later I said, "I'm sure glad you pulled that out." Everyone around me readily agreed.
I lost my group and thereby about 30 seconds off my final time because my cyclocomputer almost fell off and I spent a little time and attention trying to do something about it. As it was, my "official" time was around 1:07:20. To get a better sense of the true speed, I lopped off most of the beginning before I could get up to a normal speed. So, it really ended up to be my fastest ride ever. Even though it was downhill and we had a good tailwind for half of the ride, it is very early in the season. So, I was very pleased with the speed.
I found Craig and Jeff et al at the finish and they offered me a ride home from the U. We had to ride back to the Campus and Craig wanted to take the scenic route which included going up City Creek a ways and doing a lot more work than I had planned on.
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