#883 - the Mount Diablo Challenge

This weekend marks the first time I've ever participated in any kind of organized cycling event - the 2007 Mount Diablo Challenge, a fundraiser for Save Mount Diablo.  The Mount Diablo Challenge is a bicycle race up 10.8 miles of paved road, climbing 3249 feet (so they say) with an average grade of 5.7% or so; here's a good graph of the elevation profile.  I parked at Monte Vista High School and rode the 3 miles or so over to The Athenian School early Sunday morning; the overnight low had been chilly, but the skies were very clear and the morning was sunny - it was perfect.  Sunny, with an air temperature in the mid-50s, warm in the sun.  Perfect.

My old friends Bob and Joe and I started in wave 4, about 200 riders at the tail-end of a total of 1000.  As an aside, Bob, Joe and I first met while working at Locus Computing Corporation 20 years ago; are we really that old now?  Our heart-rate monitors were giving pretty similar numbers, so it was easy to maintain a fairly matched pace, and we rolled-up on the South Gate ranger station almost before I knew it, followed by the Rollers in Rock City.  We rolled past the Junction ranger station about 36 minutes after the start, a very decent time for me (in training rides, I've been happy to reach the Junction in 38 minutes).  Normally, I'd stop at the Junction and eat a gel, refill my water bottle, but this time I'd loaded the water bottle with Gatorade instead of water, thus obviating the need for a gel - or a stop at all.  That was the big thing for me on this ride - I was pacing myself to avoid stopping at all, since my training rides always had 10 minutes or so of stops on the way up.

After the Junction, the ride remained moderate for about a mile and a half, but notched up into a steeper climb as we passed picnic spots named Blue Oak, Oak Knoll and Grapevine - it eased off temporarily passing Juniper and the large Diablo Valley Overlook.  Bob had broken away from us by now, and poor Joe was asking me if I would still give him a ride afterwards if he wet his spandex shorts - the toilet at Juniper was a welcome sight, and we burned about a minute there.  From previous rides, I knew my hardest section was next, riding from Juniper up to Devil's Elbow, a sharp hairpin turn about 1 mile from the summit, and it was really important to keep a good pace and not burn out and stop before passing the Elbow - because the climb flattens out (by now, Joe had realized "flat" on the hill means "less than 3% grade") and there's plenty of rolling recovery there before The Wall.  All I had to do was roll past the Elbow and I'd be set to finish the ride.

We passed a remarkable pair of riders on the way to the elbow, Jens and Peter Hillen.  Peter is 6 years old and was pedalling very seriously on a tag-along attached to Jens' bicycle.  I tried to make a joke with young Peter, asking "is your dad carrying his weight?" and Peter answered with something like "he's doing the best he can" with a very serious expression.  The sincerity was almost tear-jerking.

Shortly afterwards, I passed another rider, and he called out "Hey! Myers!".  It was Ed; we'd met on the hill one morning in September and realized that our bib numbers for the Challenge were sequential (me #883, Ed #884).  Fun stuff.

After passing the Elbow (and being snapped for posterity sake), I soon shifted-up a couple of gears and enjoyed the "level" ride, and started to get psychologically ready for The Wall - a 16+ percent grade leading to the finish line. Summit Road splits into an "up" lane and a "down" lane at the base of The Wall; only for the Challenge, the "down" lane becomes the up lane - and I'd never done it that way before.  It turns out that the grade is slightly easier at first and peaks right before the finish line.  So I paced Joe until a few meters before the finish line, then sprinted. My effort was good enough to secure a 400mS lead!  1:17:08.3 represents my best time ever up the hill, and it rewarded me for nailing a pace that let me avoid stopping.  Also, narrating the ride for Joe helped me remember where the hard work and the recovery was, so I planned better and rode better.

Bob had beat us to the top about 2 minutes earlier, and we did a little sight-seeing from the summit before heading down to the "lower summit" parking lot where a big party was already in progress.  We spent about an hour there, meeting up with yet another old Locus friend, Marty Heyman of the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club, a volunteer for the event, enjoying a handful of Mother's frosted animal cookies and a Jamba Juice smoothie.

The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office was running an escort for cyclists down the hill; we had to wait in waves again, but our escort was running a very pleasant clip, basically as fast as I would normally ride down the hill.  It was icing on the cake, really - riding down the hill, working the turns in a pack of cyclists.  It took me straight back 20 years to my motorcycle road-racing days on the tracks and in the canyons of Southern California.  Once we were nearly at the bottom, in the Tire Poppers, I managed to trail-brake into a soft patch and break loose into a good rear-end slide.  My only real worry was that I'd tag a cyclist next to me, which didn't happen (it would have been Bob!).  I did manage to remember to shout out "I meant to do that! I do that every time I ride here" as if it were true after recovering a little less gracefully than I'd prefer.

We rode back to the Monte Vista High School parking lot, even though Bob and Joe started griping about something, loaded the bikes onto the Thule rack, and headed out for lunch with family at Primo's Pizza in Danville.  This was one of the most enjoyable weekends I've had in a long time - old friends, a great day and a great ride really clicked together.