It’s a Long Ride Home

Or, it’s a long ride around the Front Range… Saturday morning around 10, I met Matt at the Mt Falcon trailhead to leave his car as a shuttle, loaded his bike and gear into my car, and headed over to the Chimney Gulch trailhead for a day of fun riding. We had discussed doing a long ride for some time now, and finally made plans to do it. Note to self: Do not go out and drink with friends till 1 in the morning prior to an all day ride. Not a good idea…

Through my dreary, somewhat nauseous state, I struggled to get ready for the ride, and even managed to remind Matt to make sure he had the keys to his car. Fortunately I have done the shuttle thing enough times, and have left the keys in the other car enough times, causing us either to hitchhike, walk, or get a cab back to the second car, to always remember the keys to the shuttle vehicle. So we remembered that, but then realized that neither one of us left a spare set of clothes or extra food in his car. Oh well, not much we could do about it at that point.

Once we were ready we headed up the hill. It was long, and it took me a while to get into the groove of things. And took even longer to start to feel human. I was having fun, just had some issues on the technical sections. We reached the top, stopped at the Nature Center for a bathroom break, and headed down the Lookout trail that meets up with Apex. It was nice to have some downhill! We cruised down to the intersection of Apex and Enchanted Forest and opted for Enchanted Forest. It was a lot of fun, and by the time we started, I was feeling a lot better and having a blast. Matt was flying over everything, feeling very comfortable on his new bike. It was hard, and actually impossible for me to keep up with him throughout the day. That was fine with me, I wasn’t trying to go fast, I was more trying to see how long I can stay on my bike, since the 12 hour race is a little over a month away.

When we got to the bottom of Apex we rode down to Matthew Winters Park. One of my least favorite trails in the Front Range. We were up for it, though, so decided to do it. It was just as fun as I remembered! Still not one of my favorites… After MW we crossed the street and headed up Dinosaur Ridge. I had never been on this trail, mainly because I never really heard anything good about it! It actually wasn’t too bad, some stupid technical sections, but for the most part ridable. We didn’t do all of it, we cut down Zorro on the other side. That was a fun descent and was over too soon. Once down, we crossed C-470 and did parts of Green Mountain, then headed down to Bear Creek where we messed around on a couple trails before heading into Morrison. We took a break at the river, soaking our feet and enjoying the time off the bike. It took a bit for us to want to get back on our bikes, especially with the thought of food and beer so close to us… We did finally get back on, determined to finish what we started. After filling up on water, we headed to Falcon, where we had another tough time, seeing Matt’s car in the parking lot… We pushed through it though, and headed up. I was definitely starting to feel my legs, so I slowly pedaled up. Amazingly I was still able to clear everything, except the first section of water bars. I was more than ok with that. I met up with Matt at the gazebo, and really wanted to lay down and take a nap. Clouds were moving in, and it was getting really windy. I ended up putting on my jacket at this point. Again I had another thought, that if we turned around now, we were only about 10 minutes from the car, and only 15 minutes from an ice cold beer. Matt was persuasive enough to keep going, so I got back on my bike and kept pedaling. We made it to the paved road and cruised down to Parmalee Gulch. It would have been a lot more fun, if I didn’t have it in my head that we would have to still climb back up it. We rode up Parmalee Gulch to the Lair ‘o the Bear trailhead. Here I let Matt go ahead, I needed a break, my entire left hand was asleep and my wrist was pulsating from the pain. After filling up on food and water, I decided to head down and meet up with Matt. The plan was that I was going to turn around whenever I caught up with him. It was about 3/4ths of the way down, and frankly it was a good thing we did this. We slowly made our way back up to the road, both starting to feel the hurt of the long day. Once we got back to the road, we realized all the cars had their headlights on. We both thought it was getting darker because of all the cloud cover. We hadn’t looked at the time all day, and at this point we finally did. 8:04pm. Are you kidding!?! Where did the time go?? At least we knew why we felt the way we did…

I was kind of getting nervous, neither of us thought we would be out that late, so we stupidly didn’t bring lights. We still had the road to climb, as well as the Falcon descent, and our legs would not move us any faster. It got darker and darker on our ride up, to the point it was almost pitch black by the time we got to the gazebo. I will say, it is the most spectacular view I have had from up there, with the city lights aglow, and Red Rocks all lit up from the concert. I tried to enjoy it as much as I could, but panic was starting to sink in, knowing we had to get down the mountain. We have both done the descent enough to know where the rough parts were, but on dead legs, empty stomachs, overall tiredness and not being able to see, it was a very sketchy ride down. Super fun, but scary. Luckily we got to the parking lot without a crash, and were so grateful to be off our bikes for the day. It was a little after 9 by the time we were done, and the last car in the lot. It felt so good to get off the bike, and we were so happy to have made it down safely. Even though we had no change of clothes, or even sandals to change into, we couldn’t wait to have food and beer, so we stumbled down to the Morrison Inn. Although we struggled to even lift the glass, I think it was the best Fat Tire I have ever tasted.

Although I was tired, and more than ready to be done, we were out for long enough for me to be fairly confident I can complete the 12 hour race. Especially if I get real food in between… It was a good ride, with good company. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and plan to in the near future.