First a little geography, Ocotillo is about 80 miles east of San Diego, that puts it about 3 hours from home. We stayed the night in San Diego in anticipation of waking up and heading out at a ridiculously early time on an even more ridiculously cold morning.
To get to Ocotillo you have to go over the mountains and back down into the desert. On the way up there was snow on the ground. Snow?! Keith's exact words were "I didn't sign on for this shit." Then we passed a rolled over car with 6 boarder patrol agents. Next up was a bird that we saw miss the windshield and then we heard a thump. Hmm, was that bird bouncing off the bike, more on that later. About 5 miles from Ocotillo our phones ping from a text message. How thoughtful of AT&T to let us know we are in Mexico now and subject to international rates. Are you kidding? Were we supposed to bring passports for this century?
No question it was cold when we arrived in Ocotillo. We started by taking the bike down off the top of the car. Remember the bird? It's feather were embedded in the bra for the bike. Thankfully there was no blood.
We've never worn so many clothes to ride before. Long tights, arm warmers, wool socks, two undershirts, jersey, wind breakers, sunglasses, shoe covers, cold weather gloves and even cold weather face masks. In addition to all these clothes we had toe warmers and hand warmers. We hoped that at some point some of these clothes would come off. We even carried thinner full finger gloves in case the heavy gloves became too much. We were happily warmer then we were in Solvang a couple of months ago. We picked up our timing chip and off we went. Start time was roughly 8a.m., we could have started sooner but we thought we'd let it warm up to 36 before we went out. We want to note that we ALWAYS ALWAYS wear helmets. We wouldn't dream of heading out with them and Kathy has a mirror attached to hers.
Unlike most century rides this was an out and back course. Rest stops were about 14 miles apart.
The wind picked up off and on for the day. There were five hill climbs for a total of 4500ft of climbing. One boarder patrol crossing station, where they offered a wave as we rode through. We are most proud of the fact that only three riders passed us the entire day! We are happy to say we passed a ton of people. Who knew a timing chip could be so motivating?
We stopped at two rest stops, filled up the water bottles, had a couple of fig newtons and got out of the saddle for a few minutes. The hard part when riding is you're warm but if you stop for too long you are cold and it's really difficult to warm back up again.
If you can appreciate the beauty of the desert you can understand the scenery. This well organized ride had incredibly nice people at the rest stops. Volunteers were standing pointing the way, shouting encouragement and even one guy playing his guitar and making up songs about the riders as they cruised by.
We like to think we learn something from every century we ride. When we did Cool Breeze last year we learned that eating too much for lunch is not good. Solvang taught us to dress even warmer then we think is necessary, you can always take clothes off. Stagecoach showed us that while we need to bring our own electrolyte replacement we should limit the snacks we bring. Next month in Palm Springs we will bring shot blocks, and sport beans.
(At some point we will post our time, it has not been posted on the Stagecoach site yet.)
UPDATE OFFICIAL TIME 6hrs 14 minutes including Sag stops.
Onward we roll!
