This ride is run by the father/son team of Richard and Joel Lawrence.
http://ncbikeclub.org/randonneuring/highpoint.html
It's a terrific route -- especially the 71 miles from the start up to within a healthy spit of the Virginia state line. The course rolls and twists up through Walnut Cove, past the entrance to Sauratown Mountain. You get spectacular views of Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock. The course loops east and back south from the turnaround and while most of the hills are through by then, there's still plenty of rollers to test tired legs. The finish skirts a metropolitan area, putting riders on a busy section at the end of the day. Not much fun, but tolerable in a group of three or four riders. At the final control Joel fires up the grill and serves hot dogs and hamburgers to a ravenous and grateful group.
As fortune would have it, Me, JoeRay, Jimmy Williams and Chris from Ohio were the first finishers. We didn't plan it that way. We got lucky.
We were the first to the turnaround, having left at 7:00 with lights. Those without had to leave at 7:30, so we had a full half-hour jump on most of the field.
We made it to the turnaround at 11:04. The course is pretty hilly going out, and the turnaround is at 71 miles, so that was a respectable time.
Four minutes after we arrived at the control, the speedy crowd from the 7:30 start rolled in.
We rolled out of the stop at around 11:20, the first group to leave, and we held off the racers for over an hour, but they closed in just as we turned off a very smooth downwind stretch onto some rough chip and seal. We rode as a group for about 10 miles, then they spit three of us off the back on a steep climb up from a creek. JoeRay hung with them for a while, but two of the guys – Danny and some big tall monster – decided to ramp it up and lose him too. So he dropped back with us. But they gave us Jimmy, who had been riding with them. And that proved to be our good fortune and their bad luck.
After lots of hard efforts I felt completely cooked and had a hard time hanging on with our little group. I got a leg cramp pulling up an incline. No big surprise, as our mph average actually came up a bit in the last 50 miles.
Meantime, we noticed that the guys in front did not seem to know where they were going: we saw them pause at a stop sign for a very long lookaround before heading on.
So….we roll into the finish at 2:11 – a 7:11 200K, my personal record, and likely the same for the rest of the crew.
And guess what? No fast guys. No Danny, no big tall guy. Had they packed up and left already? Were they that far in front of us?
Nope. They got lost. 4 bonus miles. They rolled in about 15 minutes behind us.
Our ride time average was just over 18. Did the ride 19 minutes faster than last year.
We had a really good group coming home. Everybody shared the load. Joe is in fine form and really took some fast pulls at the end of the day. Our biggest asset, tho, was Jimmy who by his own admission knew the route like the back of his hand.
Goes to show a navigator is as important as a boiler room.
No comments:
Post a Comment