LA Wheelmen Grand Tour

Amber, Iria and I rode the LA Wheelmen Grand Tour on Saturday. We rode the lowland double century route because I was afraid it might get hot (we have had temps in the 90-100 range for two weeks). Amber and I used to ride this regularly but I got cold feet after the 2009 ride when Rod Armas was killed by a drunk driver during the ride.

We braved Friday night traffic to register in Malibu and as we got out of the car Shai Shprung walked past having just registered for the quad (400 miles). He rides a fixie so I'm assuming that's what he was going to ride the quad on!

Saturday morning and up at 4am (yikes) to start the ride at 5:30am. Three miles into the ride a bug the size of a cesna lodged itself in my throat. I couldn't breath, cough, or swallow so after a few seconds of struggling my stomach solved the problem by throwing up. First time that has ever happened. We made good time through to the second control near Moorpark where we ran into Greg, Ron, and Foster from the PCH Rando group. Ron was feeling rough from food poisoning so I told him about the bug which seemed to cheer him up a bit.

We all agreed to ride up the Ojai bike path from Ventura which is so much nicer than the proper route and is only 1/2 mile longer. After a long lunch in Ojai where we ran into Alan Tolkoff and Jeff Karotkin as well as Phil (whose second name I can never remember) we went back down the bike path but took a detour on Barnham so as to approach the (secret) control from the correct direction.

Turning north along the coast we had a powerful headwind. Thank goodness Foster, Greg, and Ron were with us to push through the wind. I'm sure we got to Rincon point 15 minutes earlier thanks to their efforts. The good news is that the overcast became even heavier and although it was humid, it was pleasantly cool.

Rincon Point - Ron, Greg, and Amber - Iria has her back to me.

While we were relaxing at Rincon Point we felt a few drops of rain and I could see the clouds upwind of us were precipitating so I rallied the group and we headed south to try to ride out from under the rain. We had a good tailwind and managed to get under dry clouds pretty quickly.

Elizabeth met us in Hueneme where the soup was as wonderful as usual and we hung around for a while then headed out for the last stretch with a diminishing tailwind. About ten miles from the end, where the hills start, the tailwind was replaced by a headwind. Curses! We couldn't stay with Foster on the rollers and the group ripped apart. Iria, Amber, and I regrouped and took the long way around on Malibu Road to the end of the ride to avoid that ugly left turn off of PCH. It adds distance and climbing but it's worth it.

We got back to the cars at 8:53pm for a total ride time of 15:13 which wasn't too bad. We had a moving average of 16.17 so our moving time was 12:20 which meant we were off the bikes for almost three hours. That's probably an hour more than we should have been. Oh well - we had fun.