RTR Day 2: Cortez to Telluride

June 16 — Cortez to Telluride

77 miles

5:57 ride time

8:45 elapsed time

Started at 7:15

Okay. Kid stuff is over. Now comes the first real ride — 77 miles to Telluride, over Lizard Head Pass. My longest training ride had been 62 miles, and today we’d go over 10,000 feet to boot.

Got some sleep the night before — being tired sure helps. We have a dandy system of sleeping bags, foam pads, and Thermarest mattresses that, coupled with with the soft ground of the football field, make a pretty darn comfy bed. Ear plugs are essential as well — we are crammed together like a Bombay suburb and tent walls don’t give you a whole lot of privacy. It’s an interesting experience.

But now it’s time for up and at ‘em, wiggle into our Lycra (I’m wearing my Mizzou jersey today, to fly the colors atop our first pass), and pack up our camp. We join the many other hundreds of our tribe in the long, long line for breakfast — ahhh, breakfast. There was just no way around it. You have to eat. And so does everyone else. We tried several different ways of timing our arrival during the week, but nothing worked. There was always a line. A loooooooooooooooong line. A slow line. And I’m none too happy to be even be up at 5:00 in the morning, to begin with. And you want to get going, get on the road. But instead — you wait.

This morning was funny because the man collecting money (the morning’s breakfast supported the local public radio station) got all lit up over my Mizzou jersey. “Hey, did you see the guy in the KU sweatshirt?” he asked me, and I said, Yeah, I did. “Should have charged him extra,” he said. All during the day people were hollering at me, Hey, Mizzou! And Go, Tigers! Carol would just grin and shake her head. And I would just puff up like crazy.

But we’re just dilly-dallying here, aren’t we? We finally got ourselves fed and collected and clipped into our pedals at around 7:15. The route profile showed a sharp climb out of Cortez toward Dolores, and our first aid station of the day.

RTR 2008 Day 2, Cortez to Telluride

It was hard getting started; it takes some miles before the joints feel lubricated and some kind of rhythm comes back. We pedaled along back roads out of Cortez and then had just a bit of a climb to Dolores, not bad. That was a little over an hour of riding and a good warm-up. For the next few hours the road wound up along the Dolores River, through an absolutely beautiful green, lush, cool valley. The grade was so gently uphill that it was hardly noticeable.

These miles rolled very easily by and the morning was just delightful. As we went higher, we started seeing more aspen and sharper hills ahead. We took a good long break at the aid station in Rico, an old mining town; the grade was definitely beginning to pick up, and would continue to steepen as we approached Lizard Head Pass, 18 miles ahead.

Hills. Climbing. My Achilles’ Heel. My first pass, my first test. It’s not so bad for the first 8 or 10 miles out of Rico. Uphill, but manageable. I pulled over once to take a couple of pictures — hey, it’s not a race! Stop and smell the roses. And catch your breath.

All of a sudden, the hill gets serious, and my heart sinks. Well, here we go. Pain and suffering. It is a sharp little pitch and I set my sights on a target farther up the road — the end of a guardrail along a pull-out — and take another rest break. Yeesh. It’s gonna be a long haul to the top.

But then I’m back on and the grade flattens out — ! I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m getting up above tree line now, but the road is just wandering placidly along. It seems to have gotten the nastiness out of its system. Sure enough, a mile or two of this and I can see the summit ahead. You can tell the summit of any pass along the RTR route, because it’s a giant party. Hundreds of people, music playing, huge traffic jam, and more boatloads of freakin’ nutty cyclists arriving by the minute. There is a sizable contingent of Colorado State Highway Patrol with us all week, motorcycle cops, and they do their level best to keep us from getting run over in our giddy excitement as we jump off our bikes and start hugging everyone around us.

It’s nuts.

Pass bagging: Lizard Head Pass, 10,222'

There are bunches of photos from Lizard Head on my Flickr page; check them out.

What an amazing feeling, to be on top of the first pass! It was just huge. Just that one bad little hump, and the rest was no big deal. Incredible boost to my confidence! And a flat-out gorgeous, beautiful place to be. We grinned; we giggled; we hugged and mugged for the camera. Wow.

And 3/4 of the way to Telluride! Just 13 more miles, mostly downhill! Baby! Let’s get the party started!

Did I mention something already about the difficulty in interpreting the route profile maps? Well, the map shows this one leetle hill between us and Telluride, at the Ophir Loop Junction. And it just about killed me. It just went on … and on … and on. I passed a man on a hand bike (used by paraplegics; you pedal it with your arms) and we were both coming up around a curve to find that there was still MORE hill ahead. I can’t repeat what he said, but it went double for me. @#$%. It was just endless.

Mixed in with that were downhills that were frighteningly steep on a road that was amply cracked and potholed. Each morning, in the wee wee hours, the intrepid RTR road marking crew went out before us with their cans of orange spray paint to mark road hazards. They must’ve gone through a few cans on that descent into Telluride; and to top it all off, there was a crosswind. So for yours truly, who is still quite nervous about the consequences of something going wrong when you’re screaming down a mountain pass at over 30 mph … it was white-knuckle time, for sure. Plus, if you white-knuckle it for long enough, you start to get cramps in your hands from squeezing the brake levers.

It was good to finally get down the hill.

We then had a lovely (not) several mile ride on Telluride’s terrible bike trail — so rough I was surprised to have any fillings left in my teeth when we finally arrived at the school. Not nice. We were getting a little frayed around the edges. Add to this that it was 4:00, and we had massages scheduled at 5:00. Mad scramble to find the baggage, claim one little patch of ground on the football field, and line up for the shower truck — but running out of time. There was a rumor of indoor showers in the girl’s locker room, and since the massage team was set up inside the high school, at least we’d be going in the right direction.

Can you remember your last ice-cold shower? I don’t even want to talk about it.

But the massages were quite wonderful and very much needed. We felt a little better-adjusted and sanguine about life, up until we realized that it was now well after 6:00 and we hadn’t had anything substantial to eat since lunch. Yes. We crashed. It was horrible. I thought I was going to keel over. It kept getting worse: instead of the community feed being anywhere near the school, it was literally over the other side of the mountain, reachable by bus and gondola. When we finally staggered off the gondola, we found that all but one of the food vendors had run out of food. The last one had a line a mile and half long. We found a restaurant but their kitchen was backed up an hour and they’d run out of food too. It was a nightmare.

We finally got back to the other side of town and found a nice little Mexican restaurant and sat down to eat at 8:30. I have never tasted such fabulous chips and salsa. We drank a gallon of ice water. We cursed the very name of Telluride to the heavens, so that it will be known for all time as “Helluride.”