First Time Mitchell Rider

Goal: to finish with my daughter Cinthia and do it in a time of 6 to 6 ½ hours.

It was my type of weather: not to hot and not to cold. So we started at 6:30 sharp and my domestique made me stay close to the front for the first 45 miles. The first hour was like a crit race. Our average until Bills hill was 25.5 mph. I am thinking this is like doing a Donaldson A group ride.

Then came Bill. Bill is certainly more than a hill. I gave everything to stay with the front group, but after seeing the first stars, I knew I had to back off. All of a sudden I was on my own. I am thinking oh crap now what? Very quickly I catch onto the guy in front of me and then we catch the next rider and so on. Before you knew it we were a group of 20 and what made my day is that Cinthia came back. I knew that she could have been the first female on the mountain, but she sacrificed herself for the old man. So now we are recovering well and all riders are working together and making a pace line. At about mile 50 there is a larger group of riders in sight that we eventually reel in. All of a sudden we are 35-40 riders and I am thinking that there could only be like 20 riders that got away. So we work together until Marion, which was very relaxing.

Unfortunately at about mile 60 we are turning left and a guy runs into my rear wheel. OMG I am thinking that I am going down, but for some reason I am able to control the bike and stay upright. The guy that hit me was not as fortunate and went down. Luckily he was able to get up and hopefully did not hurt himself too bad. A friend of mine that was riding behind us thinks the rider that ran into me lost his concentration for a moment due to fatigue. So we continue on. Next thing I hear is that people are telling me that my rear wheel is not true and is wobbling. Why did they tell me this, because now I am only thinking about my rear wheel. How am I going to ride 40 more miles with a defect rear wheel? I think about Christina and our camp and tell myself: this is not what you want to think about. The bike is still moving. Just get it out of your head. Cinthia tells me to open my rear brake all the way. So at least now it is not rubbing against the brake pads.

So we make it to Marion and shortly before, we or better Cinthia changed our strategy not to stop in Marion. We both had a full bottle of water and decided to make the next stop, which was an excellent decision because we could continue to draft for the next 10 miles. We stop at mile 82 and fill up our water bottles. Need to thank the lady volunteers at this stop because they new everybody was in a hurry to move on and they moved like a pit crew at NASCAR.

At mile marker 85 the pain came. I could hardly sit anymore. My daughter is constantly telling me: come on dad, you can do this, do not stop to eat and drink. At mile 92 it happened. A cyclist worst nightmare. My left leg starts to cramp. I slow down. Try to go easy and ride it out. Seems to work, but it slows the pace down for a while. Now Cinthia is making me eat more and more. She has so much food in her back pockets it reminds me of a pantry. Within a mile I thought a bolt of lightning hit my right leg. It just went from top to bottom. I have to get off the bike because the pain is so bad I would probably fall off. I try everything from stretching to jumping to get rid of the cramp. We lose a lot of time and Cinthia is pretty pissed. For the next minutes all I hear is I told you so and so forth. I am thinking, can‘t she be quiet?

We finally hit the final climb to the top. We are grinding away. I am constantly looking at the accumulated miles on my GPS. Even the tenths are moving so slow now. Eventually we hit 102, but no finish in sight. Where was the finish? The fog was so dense here, we had about 50 yards of visibility. There was another .5 miles which we rode to the finish line. You are thinking, what is a ½ mile for a cyclist? This ½ mile took forever. Finally it came: the finish line. Cinthia and I held hands as we cross. 6 hours and 12 minutes. I‘m sure we could have broken 6 hours, if it weren‘t for my mistakes, but there is always next year. I need to thank Randall and Jon for the hard training we went through these past months and a special thanks to Christina, which I‘m sure I could not have finished if I would not have constantly adjusted my head to the new hurdles.