The last weekend

Blue skies, clear blue skies,
open roads, and cacti....

Its been a wonderful trip...hard, challenging, painful yet exhilarating.

Lots of hard grinds up steep climbs, rolling hills and desert flats. Already counting the days till i get back here next year.

today was due to the the end of a hard 3days of riding.

140km and 30mins of seated big ring, low cadence intervals up Mt Lemon a steady 4-7%).


Then standing big ring intervals at a higher cadence up Gate's pass (image left) which topped out at 15%, sandwiched within a 100Km ride.

Then today was another blatt on the local shoot out, a 180km hammer fest!

however karma had other plans for me today, just as we reached the outer limits of the Indian reservation , the tempo picked up and i dropped down a huge rut in the road. At first, despite the bone shuddering crack, i thought had escaped without damage, but shortly after my rear tire began to deflate and i watched the pack disappear up the road in front of me. At that point i knew it was over, there was no way i was going to hook back on the end of that again today.

resigned to my fate i fixed my flat, and headed back home, only to find my front tire and taken the full force of the impact as well and was also flat. (see this is why i always carry two spare tubes) at that point i could only hope to be able to make it the 35km back home incident free.

which of course, given the fact I'm writing this now i managed. Slightly more successfully than some of my fellow riders. I met another a short distance away from me that had fell foul to the very same hole, yet his fondness for deep section wheels and his lack of a valve extender had resulted in him being stranded on the very same reservation i was now gleefully peddling away from.

I also saw "team" charlie one of the young riders one the camp get caught out by the unforgiving pace of the group. He picked a bad time to pee, by the time he had gotten back on the pace was up and he was left in the dust, with no hope of catching back on. I saw him later as i wrote this sitting in Starbucks...you live and learn.