Quality season begins
New casual clothes, new title and a new Ride the Rockies route. It’s been a great week.
I’m big into quality. I love when I buy something I really like and it lasts. I have a 30-year-old Golds Gym sweatshirt. I have a t-shirt from my senior high school track season. My Jake the Snake ‘cross bike is 15-years-old. And while I am riding only my second season on my current carbon fiber frame, I’m plotting for a custom Ericksen ti frame. It’s the last road frame I will ever need.
So I was wonderfully surprised when the gifts my wife bought for my birthday arrived. The first thing that struck me was the bag, itself.
Apres Velo’s bag was a hint to the quality of the apparel.
Even the bag was high-quality! The graphics, the construction, even a little window to see what would soon be my new favorite shirts. Then the shirts, themselves.
My wonderful wife bought the Sufferlandrian collection for me from Apres Velo: two shirt-sleeved t-shirts, one long-sleeved and a polo. All with great, durable stitching, great graphics, and all of the embellishment on the polo was embroidered.
One of three pieces from the Sufferlandrian collection.
A word of warning: when you order from Apres Velo, order your jersey size. These are fashions for cyclists. I usually wear a large t-shirt. My wife wisely ordered extra-large for these shirts. Large would have been uncomfortable.
Of course with this theme, I can announce that I have been awarded the Knighthood of Sufferlandria! I rode about 12 hours on my trainer, through 10 consecutive Sufferfest videos. All were challenging, all were entertaining.
If you are unfamiliar, the Sufferfest is a site that provides indoor training videos, at first for cycling, then triathlon and now running. The videos have structured workouts with a background of professional races. My current favorite is Local Hero, a series of intervals and sprints set against the background of the 2010 UCI Road World Championships in Melbourne, Australia. The creators add a bit of commentary token it fun. At the end of this workout, they added sprints against some of the best sprinters in World Championship history, including my favorite, the 2002 race won by Mario Cipollini. Another warning: remember the 10% rule when increasing your training volume. I ignored it while earning my knighthood. I am missing work as I write because wildly overtraining can result in a compromised immune system.
Hopefully, I will get some fitness gains out of this experience. One thing I know I will get is the Sufferfest Knights kit!
The beautiful Knights of Sufferlandria jersey.
I plan to wear this beautiful kit during this year’s Ride the Rockies! This year could be the most beautiful, certainly of the four I’ve ridden. The ride begins, this year, in Grand Junction on June 13, and will cover seven days, 465 mile and climb over 40,000 feet before ending in quaint, little Westcliffe on Saturday, June 20. The first day sets the tone as the ride tackles the Tour of the Moon, from Grand Junction, through the Colorado National Monument to Fruita and back to Grand Junction.
The Colorado National Monument, setting for the Tour of the Moon.
Day two is all beauty all the time with an epic 98-mile day through Palisade, up and over the highest flattop mountain in the world, the Grand Mesa, and on to lovely little Hotchkiss.
Funky, artsy little place.
It’s another stunning day when the route travels from Hotchkiss through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park to the town of Gunnison on Day three. The route is 78 miles but with the views of the Painted Wall and Blue Mesa Reservoir, it will fly by.
Blue Mesa Res., just east of the Black Canyon.
The ride went through this area in 2012, my first RTR, and I look forward to returning.
Day Four, Tour Director Chandler Smith and the gang give the riders a bit of a break with a 27 or 35-mile ride from Gunnison to Crested Butte. I’m especially excited about this day as I have never been to Crested Butte. With a short day on the bike, riders get lots of time to explore the legendary mountain town. The town has hosted the finish to a couple USA Pro Challenge stages and will be a great rest day.
Iconic Colorado mountain town, Crested Butte will welcome riders at the end of day four.
Day five will be the day everyone talks about for years. The route leaves Crested Butte to ascend 12,126-foot Cottonwood Pass, pass Buena Vista and the Mount Princeton Hot Springs into the Arkansas River town of Salida. As in 2013, Salida will also be hosting the FIBArk Whitewater Festival. The town shows hints of Colorado’s Spanish heritage with low adobe homes in close to a victorian downtown and the Arkansas River running right through the middle. The festival featured kayakers slaloming through the river as well as a fair and live music. Hopefully, riders will have enough energy to come out and enjoy the town.
Welcoming committee
Day six retraces what was to be the penultimate day of RTR 2013, Salida east to the Royal Gorge, over the bridge, over Skyline Drive and into Cañon City. In 2013, a fire engulfed the park around the Royal Gorge, burning several buildings and forcing some quick rerouting, the long way through Westcliffe, Silver Cliff, Wetmore and Florence. The positive of all of that was that the organizers got an idea. Let’s visit that area again.
The funny little town pulls out the stops for RTR
The final day of RTR 2015 will take riders south out of Cañon City, through Florence and over Hardscrabble Pass and descending, finally, through Silver Cliff to the town of Westcliffe. The town is wedged between the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the west and the Wet Mountains to the east.
Finishing up in Westcliffe
I am just beside myself with anticipation for this year’s ride. This is the year I bit the bullet and purchase a GoPro, and what more reason would I need than the sites along this route?
Before we get any further let me acknowledge that the scenic shots in this post were lifted from the RTR web site. I look forward to getting my own this year. I will also get plenty of interviews and touristy pieces, thanks to these wonderful ladies.
Liz and Renee, RTR Staff
In the mean time, I have to drive this cold out so I can SLOWLY ramp my training back up. June is coming and it will be great.
Between now and then, have fun, be safe. I’m going riding.
One down . . .
So the first day of the 2012 Ride the Rockies is in the books. It was a fun and beautiful ride, cruising the north rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. I had to admit, I liked knowing that the climbing was done at 48 miles in. I’m so tired and achy.
It was climbing for better than 45 straight miles, almost from the moment we got out of Gunnison. We had a few flat spots, like the bridge across a narrow part of he Blue Mesa Reservoir, to the big point along the way.There were plenty of picture opportunities as the striped rock of the Painted Wall beckoned. It seemed wasteful not to stop, with such great vistas spread out before us. The views of the San Juans far south of the canyon also helped to take our minds off of the heat and stinging pain in our legs.
After the climbing, there was a steep, bombing descent, followed by a long run into Hotchkiss. I didn’t have the sense to take it easy over the last10 miles, and hammered like a crazy person all the way in.
The ride organizers, who have done this for more than two and a half decades, know exactly what a tired rider need. At the finishing town, a small, mostly agricultural West Slope community of Hotchkiss, massage therapists worked out knots, the smoothy booth provided replacement calories and the local school parents and kids made dinner and lunch.
And so, now I am off to bed. Visions of a bored $8,000 race bike dancing in my head. Tommorow, an Aid Station rundown, as well as a look at the Specialized Venge Pro DA.
Walt Out West 