Since I had arrived so late, I was a bit slower getting started, rolling out the door by 6am. Still, the worker who I had talked to at midnight when I resupplied at the gas station was amazed to see me again already. “Didn’t I just see you?” … “Yep, short nap”. I had run…
I had made sure I had 24 hour access to the storage closet because I knew I would be leaving in the middle of the night. It felt a little strange to be tip-toeing through hardwood floors of the historic hotel at 2AM while carrying my bags I had taken off the bike a few…
Cold, foggy, and windy, I left the hotel at 2:10am and headed twenty-five miles straight up into a cold headwind blowing down the mountain on a large paved highway (US 285) that had me stopping to put on an extra layer even on the climb. After a few miles of climbing, the route turned onto…
Silverthorne and Salida were both important parts of my 2012 Leadville 100 MTB race. My wife and I spent the night in Salida on our drive out to Leadville so that we could pick up my race packet early the next day and then drive to our AirBnB in Silverthorne (you had to book Leadville…
This was my favorite day of the race. It started out cold with the lowest temps of the race with my Garmin bottoming out at 19 degF. But just 12 hours later, my Garmin would top out at 109 degF on the pavement climbing up from the Colorado River while getting swarmed by mosquitoes. In…
Within a mile or two of leaving the Jackalope, Steve Large caught up to me on the bike path outside Pinedale. It was great meeting him and finding out he is from a town near Birmingham, England. I told him I was from the other Birmingham – the one in Alabama. I also told him…
The day started out cold but with a beautiful sunrise over many flooded fields of flowers leaving Idaho as pictured above (39 degF and I had to hike/ride through that water in my sandals), traversed many flat miles of powerline ATV trails, merged with the Great Western Trail (rails-to-trail) for only a few miles, and…
This was the first really hot day of the Tour. You’d think with that picture above that it would be nice, pleasant riding. But the gravel road got quite a bit rougher, and the route went past those mountains in the distance before I reached any shade at all, nearly 75 miles later riding from…
Note that the “cave” was really just a deep recession in a cliff, but it was enough to get me out of the steady wind that made the 30 degF temps feel that much colder. Also, note that I fell asleep in less than a minute after getting settled and even with a down blanket…
This day had it all – the most climbing per mile of the entire race with three passes and four big climbs, the most technical single-track, the most traffic of the entire race, the strongest winds of the entire race (knocking me off my bike once) and knocking over trees uncomfortably close to me, finishing…