July 11th, 2009

Monitor pass #2 (back side)

Two other riders who had started #2 at the same time as I did soon got dropped extremely fast. I am not quite sure what happened, but it wasn’t like I was hammering it or out of the saddle. Either way, it wasn’t till about half of the way up that I started to see other riders descending what I was now climbing. I passed by the event photographer who took my picture and told me that I was the first to finish two passes. It was 615am at that point. There were about 2-3 miles from the photographer’s location back up to the aid station where I had received my 1st sticker. During these 2-3 miles more riders past me as they descended in the opposite direction and they were cheering me on for some reason. When I reached the 1st sticker aid station at the top of both passes, I topped off one bottle, had a couple sips of cytomax and half a banana. I noticed one woman who appeared to have crashed at some point already despite having only done one pass, and another guy who had a bloody nose. Now that the sun was up, I was salivating at the thought of bombing down the front side of monitor and reaching 50-60mph. My plans were sabotaged by the “peloton” or this huge mass of riders still coming up the first climb. Not only were there riders riding across the yellow line into my lane, but they were doing so at 2-3 people deep. I did notice the effort of people getting out of the way but my thoughts were that they shouldn’t be in my lane in the first place. Despite slowing down to 25-30mph, there were more than a few close calls where the people climbing just plain refused to get out of the way almost forcing me into the dirt on my own side of the road.