May 21, 2007

  • Sunday, May 20

    We did the Marshall wall ride in the CAT2 series today and it was really hard.  The route itself is 96 miles with a lot of climbing but it was made a lot more difficult by a ferocious headwind that dogged us for the first half of the day.  We had a lot of problems early on as well.  A rider had FIVE flat tires by Sausalito.  We couldn't find the problem and kept changing them until we realized that tire itself was the problem not something stuck in it.  The metal wires in the tire had begun to separate from the rubber and in addition there was at least one hole in the tire and rubber was peeling off of the inside in strips.  I've seen this before when I tried to ride my Dad's old bike after it had sat unused in a hot garage for many years, but this tire was supposedly new.  We had to leave him in Sausalito because his bike wasn't going anywhere and he went to go get coffee and wait for his boyfriend to pick him up.  We were far behind all the other riders by this point and everybody had left by the time we got to Fairfax so we kept moving.  We finally caught up with some riders on White's Hill.  And we rode into Nicasio.  There were a few riders there but they were moving as well so we just stopped for a minute. 

    We swept the last of the riders into the Cheese Factory where thankfully we were able to hang out for a few minutes and I coughed down as much food as I could.  That snarky bitch Kurt Schade made some comment about me making him look straight.  I think
    not.  The only way he could get any gayer would involve heels and a
    wig.  Besides, I could totally pass for rough trade so long as I
    neither speak ... nor move. Anyway, here's a pic of him posing with a large banana:

    After Cheese Factory, we headed off for Marshall.  There's a very long climb to the top of the coastal mountains and then a steep descent down to Marshall which sits on Bolinas Bay.  There was maybe a 40 MPH headwind that was giving a lot of the riders a pretty tough time the whole way up the hill.  It blew me off the road at one point.  Yikes!  It was a bit of a disappointment, because the hill is hard on a good day but the beautiful view from the top makes it so worth it, but the howling wind made it way to unpleasant at the top to enjoy it.  So I just took a quick pic and headed down the hill:

    Once we got down to the bay and headed south on the 1, we had that crazy wind at our back and everyone cheered up quite a bit.  Lunch at Point Reyes Station was pretty brief because we were so late getting there and because the cool, windy weather made people not want to linger.  We headed over Olema hill and into Samuel P Taylor Park.  We stopped to wait for some riders who were resting:

    And then we headed back to Fairfax.  A tree came down in front of us as we headed out of the park.  Yes it was that windy.  There weren't any riders in Fairafax either so I quickly ate a granola bar and carried my soda with me and we took off.  We had a pretty uneventful ride back to sports basement where everybody, myself included, was pretty relieved that the day was over:

    I hadn't eaten enough and it was dogging me all day.  I got home where Jeffery had prepared me an enormous dinner which I consumed in it's entirety plus additional food.  Then I went to bed.  Total Mileage: 102.  Mileage for the week 230: