Naked Mountain - and more!

Another two-fer this week, since I didn't update the blog after last week's ride.  

Last Saturday we rode from Thurmont Maryland and up through Gettysburg battlefield.  Our first warm day!  Shorts and shirtsleeves. Very pretty, rolling hills, nothing too awful, about 62.5 miles.

Here's all of us going over the cue sheet before we took off from Thurmont.

Mount St. Mary's College, very gothic.  We had bets about what it was until we got to it and saw the signs.  Lots of farm country.

 

This is what a lot of the roads we're on look like.  We try to stay away from traffic as much as possible, although we do end up on some pretty big roads for short stretches.

This was some kind of miniature horse gathering.  Lots of trailers, lots of very small horses.

Also known as the covered bridge ride - we went over or past 5-6 of them.

Tuesday after work we rode the Great Falls loop, which although I was apprehensive, was wonderful.  Here's the map: http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/md/bethesda/346127301774198028 
Apparently as much climbing as one of our earlier rides, which totally shocked me, since that ride felt so hard and this one so delightful.  I felt very strong.  Rode right up the big climb and pushed all through the last part of it.  Felt like a rock star.

Saturday May 8th was scheduled to be a relatively straightforward 70 miles, part of it on the W&OD, which I would have been well familiar with. The coaches decided to change it out for the "Naked Mountain" ride out of Gainesville VA described as "more challenging, but you're all able to do this ride", from what the alums said, Naked mountain was about in the middle of the ride, and a really hard climb.  The start was about 45 minutes from home for me. I was apprehensive before the ride (as usual) but motivated myself be thinking about people going through chemo and how they must feel waking up to that prospect.  I was choosing to ride, and seriously - a bike ride compared to chemotherapy?  Come on.  Get your butt out the door, Phyllis.

Here, I'm going over the cue sheet before the ride. The forecast was 20-30% chance of thunderstorms and a little windy.  Not terribly exciting for riding weather, but that's 70-80% chance of no-rain, right?  Most people didn't take a rain jacket, since the window for the storm was short, and the weather was pretty warm.

A cool picture of all of us riding out from the parking lot - most people wore their team in training jerseys for the day.  I think that might be me to the left of the tree, but it's a bit hard to tell, what with everyone wearing the same thing...

And here's the sky we rode into within the first few miles.  Ominous to say the least - note the substantive dearth of rain jackets.  Anyway, about 5 miles in, it started to rain.  And then rain pretty heavily, big fat drops.  I had to take off my sunglasses to see, and then had to squint the rain out of my eyes on the downhills.  It would have been pretty grim had it continued, but after about 15 minutes, we rode out of it, which was AWESOME!.  At that point, however, the wind picked up :) Who pissed off mother nature? Seriously!

One of my more experienced teammates commented as we were getting ready to ride out that the 72.5 mile ride was really more like an 85 mile ride because of Naked mountain in the middle.  Since 72.5 already seemed like an awful lot of miles (10 more than last week) I tried not think about the bigger number.  When the wind started up, I just had to laugh, because after hills, nothing makes a ride harder than riding into a headwind (except for perhaps temperature).  We were going to earn our stripes on this one.  On the plus side, despite the wind, the temperature was really nice, and the wind dried us off pretty quickly (glass half full, glass half full).  The first SAG stop was at 26.2 miles, I had been feeling great for the first 20 or so - the teammate who I was riding with was feeling a bit sore from an earlier workout and we had decided that we were going to go easy at the start of the ride and pace ourselves, since no matter how great our starts were, the ends were always a grinding slog.

The wind took it out of me a bit, so I rolled into the first stop, had a bunch of food and filled up my water bottles.  The alums pointed out that that the next stage of the ride was the most difficult by far, and to pace ourselves.  The tried to describe Naked mountain, the steepness of the top part, but when they said "there's no shame in walking" that really kind of made the point.

OK, Naked Mountain is a stern climb, and the top gets really steep.  The particularly hard part (much like Sugarloaf) is that you climb gradually all the way to the start of the mountain, so one you get there, you're already kind of worn out.

We got to Naked mountain.  I started to climb.  I suddenly couldn't move my feet anymore and had to walk up the first bit.  Once the grade leveled out, I got back on and started riding again.  I got into a good rhythm, and started feeling like I was going to conquer the mountain!  I saw my teammate(s) up ahead get off their bikes as we got to the steep top part of the mountain, I stayed on the bike...kept riding...and just kind of hit a wall as it got steep.  At which point, I walked.  To the top.  Which was harder than you might expect, my calved burned and I huffed and puffed and then we were at the top - and I was deeply relieved.  Our honored teammate's father was a SAG volunteer for the ride, and was waiting at the top of the mountain to congratulate us and refill our water bottles.

He told us that that this was pretty much the hardest ride he had done when he was part of the team, and one of the all-time hard climbs.  And then he said what everyone else kept saying - after the training rides, the Tahoe ride will be great.  Well, then I'm looking forward to Tahoe.  After the ride he sent us a video that his teammate had taken when they rode Naked mountain in the fall, and noted that at 1:15 the mountain starts, and they walked from there...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2VdILSLfqw

So that was about mile 46 out of 72.5.  Still some miles left to go.  They were hilly, they were rolling, they had some sweeping downhills, and again, I didn't eat quite enough (I'm amazed at how much I have to eat, I think it's because the rides are so long) but it was beautiful.  About 10 miles from the end, though, I just felt the energy drain out of me.  I stopped and ate a bar and perked up.  Pretty clear what was going on.  Lots of wind and a bit of an allergy attack, but two more SAG stops (every 20 miles or so) and riding with my teammate(s) made it pass by without too much suffering.   And the last 5 miles were awesome (mostly) downhill with the wind at our backs, for what seemed like the first time all day. 

We rode into the parking lot feeling good! I was incredibly glad to be done, but if there had been more miles to go, I think I could have done them.  Slowly ;)  It took 6 hours and twenty minutes.  The lead group finished in about 4:45, the last people rolled in at least 45 minutes after I got back.  Happy to be in the middle, happy it was a good ride, happy to have it behind me.  Next will apparently seem easy compared to this week (now that would be fantastic for an 80 mile ride) and then our last ride is in Middleburg, it's 90 miles and is another hard one.  The last photo is with Rob, a team alum in the lot after the ride.  In the car on the way home, I heard all these weather advisories - high wind!  Trees came down all over the area, and the winds were fierce on the drive home. What a day! 

And that's it for this incredibly long post - go team!