Last weekend, Team BT was lucky enough to be invited to Rapha's East Coast Gentleman's race.
The course started in Litchfield, CT and went into MA and NY at points. ~115 miles, somewhere between 9000-12000 feet of climbing (depening on who was counting!), 40% gravel roads. You basically have teams of 6 and you all have to finish together. They stagger the start times of teams based on perceived team strength.
Our squad of gentlemen included myself, Gerald, Brendan and Mikey Green. Our good friends Joe Reynolds and Donny Green were nice enough to ride with us as ringers to round out our group. They ended up being awesome additions, riding strong all day.
BT ended up 3rd behind Eastman and Team Embrocation. However, we had the 2nd fastest time of a team that finished all six dudes. Jonathan Adler got 5 people finishing ahead of us, but were DQ'd for losing a guy.
I have never suffered on a bike they way that I did on Saturday. I had been in Wichita, KS for the past two weeks, riding nothing but flat, straight roads. I got back into Philly at midnight on Friday and was on the road for CT at 4:30am. Not a great start to what would end up being an insanely hard day.
The majority of the climbing was on two endless gravel hills...I'm not sure of the exact distance of each, but the first one took about 45 minutes to get up. 45 minutes of 8-15% grade on gravel. I'm talking going 7mph spinning a 60 cadence in my 39x26. I'm usually totally solid going uphill, but I did not have it this day. I was cramping by mile 40. I actually had to stop for a little bit going up the second big climb, and I'm not too proud to admit that Joe pushed me uphill on at least two separate occasions. These climbs were evil...they just kept going and going and going.
As a cruel joke, they sent us up one last insanely steep, shorter hill about 10 miles from the finish, aptly named Everest Hill road. I had to paperboy it going up. I hit some gravel on the side of the road, both my thighs cramped and I came to a complete stop and tipped over. A lot of the ride was being photographed by Rapha and I was very glad that they didn't catch that!
All of the parts of the ride that didn't suck were some of the best riding ever...I've never been up to that area before and it was beautiful. The roads were great and scenic there were a few long, fast descents with switchbacks that were amazing and so much fun to ride. If you asked me immediately after finishing if I would ever do that ride again, I would have said emphatically "fuck no", but by today I've forgotten how hard it was and how I can't wait to do it again next year!
Big thanks to the folks from Rapha, not only for putting on an awesome event and also for putting us up (not to mention putting up WITH us) for a few nights.
The ride was documented extensively by Rapha with photos and video, and I'll be sure to post links as soon as they hit the web. I apologize for the lack of details in this report, but I spent the entire 7.5 hours in the pain cave and my memories are pretty foggy.
Results:
1: The Eastmans (7hrs 43min)
2: Embrocation 6:40
3:Bicycle Therapy 7:25
4: HUP UNITED 8:15
5: Rapha Racing NYC 8:00
6: Rapha Continental 8:17
7: Geekhouse 9:23
8: Seven 9:38
9: Fifth Street Cross 9:45
10: Independent Fabrication 10:10
11: Bilenky 10:55 (all tandems)
12: Adler *Finished a man down 7:15
13: Pedro's *Finished a man down 7:30
14: BH/Garneu *Finished a man down 7:34
