Sunday, June 24, 2007

Pain, Ache, and Humility

Saturday was a great day to ride a bicycle in North Carolina. Check out my ride info, provided by Garmin at Motionbased.com. The ride was perfect, neither of us had a mechanical failure! According to my GPS it took me 6 hours and 13 minutes to complete the ride, but it stops tracking time while I'm at rest breaks. The race clock showed 6 hours 38 minutes when I crossed the line. The ascents were torture, keeping me climbing for 2 hours and 38 minutes.
Blood Sweat and Gears 2007
Map of Blood Sweat and Gears 2007

Full Race results for Blood, Sweat, and Gears 2007 can be found @ Race Management Systems.

The professional photos should be posted on the Bird's Eye website. (I was bib #189. John (aka "InfinityMan") and Drew can post their number in the comments if they'd like.) I'll post some of my pictures in our photo repository.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It gives one a new appreciation of what it must be like to do rides like this every day for a month (Tour de France) . . . shoot, I'd be on the juice, too, if I had to do that!! It's amazing how many big hills they can fit into a piddly 102 miles . . . any single one of them wouldn't be too bad, but after you've already been up 15 or 20 monster hills and you find yourself at the bottom of one more . . . you gotta dig deep. On the very last hill I saw one rider just grind to a halt and fall over. One of the race folks was trying to convince this disoriented fellow to not get right back on his bike and instead to walk to the top and then coast in to the finish.

I had a great ride (took about 20 min. of last year's time) and greatly appreciated the good company of Jon and John.

Best, Drew C. (bib #150)

Anonymous said...

P.S. Max grade of 25.5%!!! Love it. Awful and beautiful at the same time.