Six straight hours of sleep, what a luxury.
I rolled out of bed, grabbed a shower, then headed to the breakfast at the hotel. 4 bowls of cereal, with lots of added protein powder and I was stuffed.
Needed to do some minor bike maintenance today and discovered an invention I'm pretty proud of. The bellboy workstand.
We started our day at 8AM local time with the temperatures hovering in the mid 40's. Andrew gets chilled easily. so he opted for the taliban garb early in the day. It slowly warmed up as we climbed our way back into Pagosa Springs.
Somewhere along the way Ed managed to impale the rear bumber of METAL-1 (our car) with a bent snow level marker. We were lucky it didn't actually damage anything.
After rolling through Pagosa Springs, our job was to tackle the Wolf Creek grade. This is an epic climb that rises to 11k ft., also the highest point in this year's race.
As we approached the grade we decided to split up the 8 mile climb in 1 mile pulls so that we could maximize our speed. Most of the climb was between 7 and 8% grade, Not tremendously steep, but at that altitude, the engine isn't quite as efficient. The 1 mile pulls worked out great, but about 2/3 of the way up the climb we shifted to 1/2 mile pulls so we could effectively sprint and then exchange. At about 10.5k ft elevation the slight bit of rain became ice. I topped the summit (also the continental divide) and began to descend into a flurry of ice coming down. Pretty quickly I was descending at 50mph. Fortunately the roads were still dry. The storm was just coming in. Back down at 10kft the snow/ice quit and we enjoyed a fast 40 mph descent down to about 8500ft.
We wrapped up the last 2 hours of our shift on a very gradual descent down the East side of the Rockies. Fortunately we had some pretty generous tailwinds most of the way.
Time Station data:
Andrew and Jeremy Average this shift: 21.37mph, 20.95mph, 27.16mph
Team Type 1 Average this shift: 20.95mph, 20.5mph, 24.11mph
About 30 mins before the end of our shift we got news from group #2 that Tobias was not able to keep any food down, so they may be a bit late. When they did show up to relieve us Tobias took the first pull, so it appears that he recovered. Sure hope he's OK.
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