Tour of Califonia Day 1 and 2

My personal tour of California started yesterday when I arrived in Santa Barbara for a little week of training camp with the Triplets of Douville. Pretty much from the landing, we headed out for a little ride to the top of Painted Cave. There's two ways to describe this ride, up and down. You go straight up for about six miles before turning around and going back down the same six miles. Nothing that I have ever ridden on the East Coast matches this. This climb started at 75 feet above sea level and rose 2600 feet. Unknowingly, the temps dropped by twenty degrees over this time. I was sweating profusley, only aware of the temperature by the feel of the cold water in my bottle. It was fantastic. One day in California, and an hour and 45 minutes of riding. Less impressive was the sub 12 mph average over that distance. It was that slow of a slog uphill, because coming down we were moving.

Day 2 started a bit ugly. By 2am it was raining pretty hard, by 4am the winds were picking up, and by 6am it was like being in the middle of a hurricane. If not for the window of clearing around 10am, the day might have been a wash out. John, Gary and I took to the streets looking to get about an hour into our two hour ride before. It's tough to head out for a ride in the rain, but if you are out and it starts, there's no reason to head home early because you are already wet. Five minutes into the ride, the skies returned to hurricane forces and we were instantly soaked. OK, time to continue on. 45 minutes or so later, the rains subsided, but so didn't John's enthusiasm for riding. With the second smartest decision of the day (Steve staying home took the top honor) John turned for home. Gary looked at me and asked if I wanted to do something epic. Always up for something cool, we took off on rt 101. This isn't some sissy New England highway, this is the real deal. The sort of road that on the entrance ramps has signs back home that say "no pedestrians, no bikers, no horses, etc" and you wonder what knucklehead would ride on this sort of road. On ramps and off ramps, coupled with tractor trailers spraying the remnants of the storm, were mixed in with some nice rolling roads. After about 9 miles of screaming TT pace, we came to our exit and headed for Refugio Rd. The pretty lemon and avacado groves gave way to Columbian countryside. Having never been to Columbia, and referring to Hollywoods version of it, we started to climb. And continued to climb. After quite a long time, I told Gary that I felt like we had been climbing for an hour. Nope, closer to an hour and fifteen minutes. Another 20 minutes later and we came to the end of the main road. "What's that way?" I asked, "Oh, it continues for another 3 miles to the tower" was the response. Off I went. At this point we were well into the climbs, and while it wasn't raining any longer, it was 100 percent humidity, so we effectively rode through rain that was getting ready to fall to the ground. After 35 minutes, and Gary saying it was only another 500 meters until the tower, we pulled the plug and called the calvery. Steve thankfully pulled himself from live coverage of the Amgen Tour of California and met us back at the bottom.

After two days of riding, my mileage is super low, but every mile has been straight uphill. Day 2 has been awesome, day 3 calls for riding of the Solvang TT and epic climbing on the way home.