Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Catching Up

It has been a few days since I updated other then a quick call to my wife.

We had a long day through the Rockies with Paul riding 218 miles that included three passes over 9500 feet with Wolf creek pass being the tallest at 10,800. This pass is where Des Moines cyclist Bob Breedlove was killed during RAAM. We managed to dodge the heavy rains over the passes and got him into South Fork, Alamosa and La Veta. The climb to La Veta was harder then it looked and really took it out of him. He rolled into Trinidad at 1:30 am and was shot. 3 and 1/2 hours sleep later we had him on the road and it was not a pretty sight.
Our average speed heading towards Kim was about 12-13. This was slightly downhill section and we figured we would move along pretty good. Paul was really struggling and it took quite a bit to keep him moving down the road. We bribed him with candy and gum, gave him some short breaks and even took a nap in Kim but nothing was working. Shortly after Kim it was decided that we would stop at Springfeild CO, just short of the TS in Walsh and get 8 hours of sleep before pushing on early in the morning. This decision was going to put us behind the time schedule cut-off but there is no "official" cut-off until Maryland so we would have to push harder after the long break but that would be better then the alternatives. It was our last ditch effort to finish this race. The sleep did him wonders as he headed out this morning as a new man. We were 12 hours behind schedule and we cannot afford another long break and still finish the race.

Hopefully now that we are out of the mountains we can get more updates in a timely fashion.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Paul,
Great to see you recovered from the mountains.
Motor on!

Tom