El Tour de Mesa

I signed up for this race a couple of months ago, knowing that I wanted to do a few bike tours this spring and having read good reviews about this one.  I'd never ridden in the area, and had only the course map to go off of, so I really had no idea what to expect for the course.  I knew it looked mostly flat, with hills coming at the end of the route, and I'd heard that Usery Pass was a killer.  So I was hoping to do well and decently up my average speed from El Tour de Tucson last fall, but I also wasn't setting any hard goals for myself- I mostly just wanted to enjoy the ride.

Josh and I drove up to Phoenix Friday night and stayed at Mom's house so that we would be able to get a few extra hours of sleep.  We woke up at 4:30 and tried to get up and get going as fast as possible.  I ate a bagel thin with nutella in the car, which seems to be my pre-ride breakfast of choice lately.  The race was to start at 6:15, and we pulled into the parking lot a few minutes before 6.  After pumping up tires, putting on sunscreen, double-checking all of our gear, etc., we ended up pulling into the startup line with only about 3 minutes left, which actually worked out pretty well.  I chugged a 5-Hour Energy and was ready to go.

We started with the pack at the start, and it took me about 2 minutes to get over the timing mat after the gun went off.  Josh immediately took off ahead of me (his one and only goal for the day was to beat me), and while I of course wanted the bragging rights to beating him again, I also didn't feel like pushing too hard and burning out before the hard parts of the course, so I let him go.  I hopped back and forth between a couple of big groups of riders and kept up a solid pace for the first 30-40 miles.  This was the fun part.

Around mile 15, I hit a really big bump in the pavement on an overpass, and my front water bottle cage completely broke off of my bike, taking my almost-full bottle with it.  I was sad to lose my bottle, especially since that meant I'd have to stop more often to refill, but I was very glad that I was able to see it happening and yell out to the people behind me so nobody would run over it and crash.


I stopped at an aid station around mile 44 to refill, and saw Josh standing there.  He was obviously surprised to see me so close behind him, and immediately took off once he saw me pull in.  Silly boys.  If I had known I was that close behind him, I would have probably pushed a little harder during those first flat sections.  ;)  I ate a gel somewhere around this section, and had a piece of banana at one of the aid stations.

(Notice the lack of a front water bottle cage...)

There was a long, sustained uphill after the mile 44 aid station.  It wasn't too bad of a climb, but for some reason I just could not find anybody to ride near.  I felt like I was riding completely alone for this entire middle section of the race, and that was kind of frustrating.  People were either moving like snails in front of me and I'd pass them, or people would fly by me like I was hardly moving.  Odd.

There were a lot of rolling hills on the Bush Hwy leading up to Usery, and it was really beautiful.  Lots of healthy saguaro and very pretty cliffs on both sides.  I stopped at the aid station just before the pass, and joked with other riders about how the fun was just about to start.  At this point we were also mixed in with riders from the 26-mile ride, so it was a very mixed bunch.  Usery Pass is about 3.5 miles long, all uphill, gaining about 600ft in elevation.  I think if this had been at the beginning of the race, I would have been fine... but to put it at mile 58 of a 72-mile course?  That's kind of evil.  Quite a few of the 26-mile participants were walking up the hill with their bikes, which looked miserable.  I leap-frogged back and forth with a couple of older guys the whole way up, all of us trying to joke about our abysmal speeds and the wind that decided to pick up just as we started the hill.  It took a long time, but I finally made it up to the top, and had also lost about 3mph on my average speed for the whole ride in the last 4 miles.  ARGH.

I tried to push as hard as I could for the last ten miles of the course, but my back wasn't very happy with me and it was a bit painful.  I stayed with one of the guys I'd been riding the pass with, and we chatted a bit which helped.  With 3 miles left I was ready for it to be over, so I left my riding buddy behind and pushed through the final headwind to the finish line.  Of course Josh was there, waiting with a smug grin on his face to tell me by exactly how much he had beat me.