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The 2008 Velo-One Spring Training camp was held on April 18-20. We had over 55 participants for this 3 day camp. The Estes Park YMCA of the Rockies provided us with the best training base-camp possible and gave us access to some of the most beautiful rides in Colorado. Riders of all abilities challenged themselves with the support of their Velo-One friends and teamates. Riders started their camp by riding from Fort Collins to Estes Park via the Beautiful Big Thompson Canyon. The Glenhaven Switchbacks along with the distance of the ride gave riders their first challenge of the weekend. Saturday, the Queen stage of the camp made every rider dig deep during this very tough 85 miles day. Many riders forged new milestones with the support of Velo-One and fellow riders. The final day, with tired legs, each rider mounted their trusty bikes for the final ride down to Fort Collins and through the foothills of the Buckhorn Valley. Riders finished exhausted and sun burned, but grinning from ear to ear.
Each day riders enjoyed the camp style atmosphere with all you can eat meals before and after every long day of riding. Long lasting memories, new friends and great fitness sum up our weekend at camp.
More details, pictures and stories to come... | |
Camp 2007 : Through The eyes of Salty and Theresa Galvis
T. and I survived the Velo-One Cycling (our new cycling team) Spring Training Camp this past weekend. On Friday, we rode 42 miles from our home in Fort Collins up Big Thompson Creek Canyon to Estes Park. We climbed from 4850 feet in elevation at our home to 8150 feet at the YMCA camp in Estes Park where we all stayed. The climbing didn’t really start until we had ridden 16 miles from our home and gotten to the entrance of Big Thompson Creek Canyon. For the next 22 miles we climbed from 5,000 feet to 7,700 feet in Estes Park with an average grade of about 5%, but stretches of 7-8%. At that point we were excited to get to Estes Park finally, and we cruised leisurely through town for a mile and-half, until we got to the road to the YMCA camp. At about that point, we had to stop and wait with a few cars and a motorcycle for a herd of about two dozen elk who abruptly decided to cross the road in front of us, looking for greener pastures. (When you get into Estes Park from any direction, you pass road signs that warn you to “Watch for Elk on All Roads in Estes Park,” and they’re all over the place in town.) Then we discovered that we had two more miles to ride to the Y camp over which we had to climb another 450 feet before we got to the camp. (Think climbing Red Bluff, which has an elevation gain of about 200 feet in a mile, for two miles.) And at the end, the entrance road to the Y camp rose up for about three-tenths of a mile at an 11% grade. It was very rude. It took us 3:01, at an average speed of 13.4 mph for the 42 miles from our home to the camp.
We had some excitement Friday night after we went to bed. T. and I were sharing our dorm room with Bob Green, the team’s founder and director, Bob’s very pregnant wife Stacy, and their two-and-a-half-year-old son Alex. At about 3:45 on Saturday morning, I awoke to hear Stacy whispering to Theresa that her water had broken, and we helped them pack up and head back down to Fort Collins (actually Loveland, the town about five miles south of Ft. C), where Stacy had her new baby boy, Bryson Maxwell Green, at 2:07 p.m. on Saturday (about nine days before her due date, but baby and mom are doing fine).
On Saturday morning (after we told everyone else on the team who was at the camp – 20 other team members – about Bob and Stacy while we were all at breakfast in the cafeteria), the team broke up into three groups, the “Team Riders,” i.e., the guys and gals (in addition to T., there were four other women from the team at the camp) who race competitively, the fast “Club Riders,” i.e., the team members who either don’t do road racing or do multi-sport racing only, and the slow Club Riders. The planned route was a 60-mile loop out of Estes, starting on CO Hwy 36 (which goes from Estes through Lyons to Boulder), then returning on CO Hwy 7 from Lyons back to Estes. After leaving the camp and going back through Estes, we had a rude two-and-a-half-mile climb to the start of a 20-mile descent to Lyons. We thought we’d just be flying for the 20 miles of the descent, but there was a ferocious south head wind that kept us from being able to go more than about 30 to 35 mph max, even on the 7 and 8% grades downhill. T. has become a fearless and very skilled descender since she got here, and she left me in the dust for the next 20 miles. Even the Team Riders were impressed with the way she could fly down the mountains, and I wore myself out pedaling against the wind for most of the 20 miles down into Lyons trying to catch her, which I never did. In Lyons, the entire team re-grouped, shed outer layers of clothing, ate drank, went to the bathroom (there was ma very nice public bathroom at a small park there), and then started up the 35-mile return on Hwy 7 back to Estes Park. Unfortunately, the route back was nothing but climbing for the next 15 miles from an elevation of 5100 feet in Lyons through the St. Vrain River Canyon to a point about 8200 feet in elevation about 20 miles from Estes Park. Then the route had some rolling terrain for the next eight miles that gradually took you along the borders of RMNP to a high-point elevation of 9200 feet about 12 miles outside of Estes. After that, it was a scary 12-mile descent back down to Estes at 7700 feet, with some sharp curves on a narrow two-lane road, with no guardrails along the outside to give you even the slightest level of comfort that you wouldn’t fly off the road over the precipices on some of the steep and sharp outside curves. However, T. and I never had to face the challenge of that descent, because we didn’t make it that far on the road back. After 14 miles of climbing from Lyons to a point about 8100 feet in elevation, we were done. I stayed with T. on the climb out of Lyons and never really worked hard enough to generate enough body heat to stay warm. The sky clouded over, the temperature dropped rapidly (from the mid 60s to the high 40s), the humidity rose (which kept my sweat and clothes from drying), the wind began to blow down the canyon, and in my wet clothes, I soon became very chilled and began to worry about hypothermia. Our team sag vehicle had left us several miles behind to go on up ahead of the team, so I couldn’t recover my tights or jacket or warm gloves, and by the time we finally caught up to the sag vehicle, after about an hour and a half of climbing (and a total of slightly more than 2:45 of riding to cover 38 miles overall), I was shaking and getting light-headed. So when we got to the sag car, T and I both climbed off the bikes, put them on the bike rack, got in the car and put on our tights, gloves and jackets to try to warm up. I was disappointed that we didn’t finish the ride, because we had pretty much completed the hard climbing, and I would really have enjoyed the last 20 miles of the route. The scenery was absolutely spectacular (as it had been for all of the riding we had done on Friday and Saturday), and the final 12-mile descent to Estes Park would have been thrilling. Some of the pitches were as much as 11% grades, and some of the guys told us they got up to 55 mph, even against the wind. As we rode back in the car, I thought of getting back on my bike again, but I knew that wouldn’t be a good idea. The wind chill on the descent would surely have thrown me into hypothermia, so I let discretion be the better part of valor. Saturday afternoon and evening at the camp with the rest of the team members was a lot of fun, and after dinner about two-thirds of us all went to a bar in Estes and had a great time. The team was formed only a few months ago, and this was the first time so many of the members had spent any extended time together, so everyone was getting to know everyone else. Everyone seemed genuinely nice, and even the serious roadies (and they have several who are just outrageously good, Cat 1 and 2 racers) were very friendly and inviting in their attitudes. Of course, T has already made a great impression on everyone else on the team, and they all love her, so that’s great. Some of the guys had their wives and kids with them at the camp, so that was nice, too. It turned out that one of the guys, Joe Bagley, who seemed to be the best cyclist on the team (at least among those who attended the camp), is also a professional massage therapist, so T and I made it a point to let him know that we’d be going to see him soon. Another of the guys, Steve Maxwell, reminds us a lot of Tony, tall and funny and “chicken-legged.” Another, Glen Ackerson, reminds us of Bob Hodges, although older. He was glad to see me join the team, because he was the oldest guy (53) until I showed up. (It figures that I would immediately become the oldest guy on the team.) Two of the women, Meredith Lawton and Shawna Jackson, who are 36 and 37, are close friends and triathletes, and Meredith is a spin instructor and triathlon coach. One of the women, Tammy Lucas, is new to cycling but has already done her first criterium race and really enjoyed it. She’s also very devoted to the cause of raising money for MS, because she was inspired to lose 80 pounds through cycling by a cyclist named Jim Dunlap (who’s now the Trek/VW team manager and race promoter), who contracted MS some time ago and now goes to local clubs to inspire new cyclists and the cause of MS research. One of the teams main sponsors, Tom Jensen, is a very good racer who also has a bike repair business, Perfect Circle Cyclery, that he operates out of his home and a large delivery-type van. He drove the van to the camp, hauled all our overnight bags, did mechanical work on bikes throughout the weekend, provided tubes, food, and equipment to all of us, and did the Saturday ride. Tom had originally planned to be the sag vehicle driver for us on Saturday, but then another team member who drove up on Saturday morning discovered that he had forgotten his bike shoes, so he volunteered to drive so that Tom could ride.
Sunday’s riding was chock-full of excitement and adventures. On Sunday different folks did all sorts of different rides. Some, who had driven to the camp on Friday, just rode around Estes Park and RMNP before driving back home. Some did a loop around Estes and RMNP and then rode back home. T and I were pretty tired, so we planned just to ride straight back home the way we had ridden up through Big Thompson Creek Canyon. However, Glen, Shawna, Meredith, Steve Maxwell (who reminds us of the Chicken) and a couple of the other guys named Geoff Kahler (another of the older club riders) and Steve Juarez (one of the racers), talked us into joining them for a slightly different route back home. It left Estes through a different canyon, Glen Haven Canyon and then intersected with Big Thompson Creek Canyon about 12 miles down from Estes. Glen Haven Canyon is famous for four very steep and sharp (virtually 180-degree) switchbacks right at the top of the canyon. Theresa had ridden up Glen Haven Canyon once before and then back down it, so she was familiar with riding the switchbacks in both directions. I had seen the switchbacks the weekend before when Theresa and I drove home from our anniversary weekend in Estes through Glen Haven Canyon, so I knew how steep and sharp they were but hadn’t actually ridden them. When we got to the top of Glen Haven Canyon on Sunday, T and the two Steves took off first and fastest. Shawna, who had protested several times earlier about how she was scared of fast descents, followed more cautiously with Meredith. Geoff, Glen and I, who had stopped a while earlier to remove our jackets, were farther behind, and I wasn’t in a hurry to go screaming down to the switchbacks. Unfortunately for Steve Juarez, who had ridden Glen Haven many times and knew better, he was going too fast by the time he got to the first switchback, which curved sharply to the left at a steep pitch. He might have been able to negotiate the switchback anyway, but he hit some of the residual sand/gravel mixture that the state puts on all the mountain roads to help melt the snow, and his bike began to slide towards the guardrail. He hit the guardrail from his right side, broke his carbon fiber fork clean off his frameset, “taco’ed” his big front chainring and broke one of the spokes on the chainring, somersaulted over his bike and the guardrail, and miraculously landed on his feet on a small plateau of level ground on the other side of the guardrail. He was very fortunate not to have been seriously hurt or killed. Had he gone over the guardrail about 20 feet further down the road, he would have fallen 150 feet or so down the side of the canyon.
As if Steve J.’s accident weren’t enough excitement at that point, Meredith discovered at the same time, when she tried to stop and unclip near the guardrail, that she couldn’t unclip her right shoe from her pedal, so she almost went down trying to stop. Apparently she had lost a screw from the SPD cleat on her right shoe, so when she twisted her right foot to unclip, the shoe just spun around the top of the cleat. She reminded me of Sue, because she said that she has always unclipped on the right side and wasn’t used to trying to unclip on the left. When she finally stopped, she had to take her foot out of her shoe to get off the bike, because she simply couldn’t remove her right shoe from the pedal. After we all had stopped, discovered the damage to Steve J’s bike and the predicament with Meredith’s cleat, and breathed a sigh of relief that Steve hadn’t been seriously hurt (he mashed a fingernail against the guardrail, cut his hand and pulled a muscle in his inner thigh), we tried to figure out what to do. We finally got through on a cell phone (it took several tries on three different phones) to another team member, Joe Hunter, who had agreed to drive Meredith’s Explorer back to Ft. C from Estes, so that Meredith and Shawna, who had driven up Friday, could ride back home. Joe was going to come pick up Steve and Shawna, who was so freaked out by Steve’s accident that she lost all desire to ride back home. So as we all waited around for Joe to get there, we took phone-cam pictures of the carnage, the victims, etc., joked nervously about the accident, and chatted with a volunteer worker who was there on the road with dozens of other volunteers who were cleaning up litter and debris on the road through Glen Haven Canyon. The volunteer (a retiree who offered to give Steve and his bike a ride back to the YMCA camp) told us that Steve was very lucky, that cars frequently go off the road at the same spot where Steve crashed, and that the section of guardrail there had been replaced several times. Finally, Glen, Geoff, Steve M, Meredith, T. and I decided to get back on the road and head down the canyon. We had to help Meredith get back on her bike, because she had to put her foot back in her right shoe, which wanted to spin around the cleat. Geoff took off first, Glen and T took off just behind Geoff, Steve M followed T. and Glen, and Meredith and I brought up the rear. Both Steve M and Meredith, who were in front of me, were pretty spooked by the pitch and sharpness of the switchbacks, and they rode their brakes all the way through the four of them. The switchbacks were too narrow and sharp for me to try to pass them, and I wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea of building my speed up too quickly, so I didn’t mind staying behind them. However, as soon as we cleared the last switchback, I passed them and let loose down the canyon. Once again, however, we were going against a stiff up-canyon headwind, and I only got up to about 45 mph without pedaling. That was fast enough for me, though, because the wind was pushing me around pretty badly, so I felt no need to pedal and concentrated instead on maintaining a good line through the curves and a firm grip on the handlebars. Geoff, Glen and Theresa were pedaling hard and flying down the canyon (they told us later they were going 50 mph) and were just specks in the distance ahead, and then they were gone around a curve and out of sight for the next few miles. I finally came around a hard curve and into the village of Glen Haven, which had a 25-mph speed limit and a sign requesting that everyone please abide by the speed limit, so I braked and then saw Glen and Theresa waiting for the rest of us in the road ahead. (Geoff had gone on and hadn’t waited). Glen, T., Meredith, Steve M and I regrouped as we passed through the half-dozen wooden structures that constitute all the buildings in Glen Haven and then proceeded in a fast pace line down the canyon, catching Geoff about two miles from the canyon’s intersection with Big Thompson Creek Canyon at the village of Drake. We stopped in Drake for Meredith and me to pee and to see if Joe, Shawna and Steve J might meet up with us in Meredith’s car. Meredith had to coast to an upright post to hold on when she dismounted her bike, since she still couldn’t seem to unclip successfully with her left foot. She got her left shoe out of the pedal but still leaned to her right when she began to stop and would have fallen on her right side if she hadn’t caught the post. None of the businesses on the road in Drake was open, so I found a spot behind a fence to pee. Meredith was pacing back and forth and refusing to pee in the open, since she’d never done that before and was afraid some kids might come out of a house in a yard behind the fence and see her. I told her she needed to go to Mandeville and spend some time riding with Sue and Caroline, and she’d soon lose all her inhibitions about that. Eventually, Meredith went to the spot I found behind the fence and had her first open-air pee on a bike ride. She was hilarious talking about another “first” for her on a bike ride that day. (The other “first” for her that day was dismounting her bike from the left side.) We soon decided that the folks in Meredith’s Explorer weren’t going to meet us anytime soon, so we all remounted our bikes and then resumed our pace line down Big Thompson Creek Canyon towards Loveland and Ft. C. Despite the fact that we were frequently descending on a 6 or 7% grade, the up-canyon wind held our speed in check, so we had to do a lot more vigorous pedaling than we had thought we’d have to do. However, we were moving along consistently at a pace of 25 to 30 mph, so we were covering the dozen miles or so back to the end of the canyon pretty quickly, despite the stiff headwind. I felt great and was having a great ride. I got a few compliments on my long, strong pulls, which made me feel good, esp. after I had crapped out on Saturday. Then, with about three miles to go to the end of the canyon, I felt my left foot sliding around on the pedal, and at first I thought maybe I had lost a screw in my cleat also and that my shoe was sliding around on the cleat. It was hard to concentrate on it too much, because we were moving fast on a narrow, curving two-lane road with little or no shoulder space outside the fog stripes, hemmed in by guardrails, with lots of motor vehicles flying past us. So as I was wondering about why my left shoe was starting to slide around on my pedal more and more, we entered a tight right-hand curve against a guardrail at about 25 or 26 mph, with several cars passing us, and suddenly my left foot went flying off to the left as my left crank-arm come off the bike and began spinning around the pedal, which was still attached to my foot. The spinning crank-arm bounced off the pavement a couple times, before I realized that I had to hold my left foot high in the air, and I knew I had to stop ASAP. Fortunately we cleared the guardrail and came to an area where there was a bit of room off the right side of the roadway, and I hollered to the people in front of me that I had to stop. I delicately stood on my left pedal, which was still attached to the crank-arm, unclipped my right foot from the right pedal and swung my right leg over the bike, with Steve M supporting me, so I wouldn’t fall if my left pedal slipped on the pavement beneath me. Then I sat down and managed to unclip the left pedal, with the dangling crank-arm, from my shoe. Once I realized what had happened, I tried to figure out what I was going to do. Geoff had gone back up the road and found a screw that had come out of my crank arm, but it wasn’t the main fastener for the crank-arm. I tried to mate up the grooves of the crank-arm spindle eye with the splines of the crank spindle (hoping I had the crank-arm in the right orientation, 180 degrees from the orientation of the right crank-arm), but I couldn’t get the crank-arm back flush on the spindle. I didn’t want to have to sit on the narrow side of the busy canyon roadway until someone could rescue me in a vehicle, and I didn’t know who I’d be able to get to rescue me. I also realized that I wasn’t going to be able to make the bike rideable, so I decided to try to coast down to the end of the canyon, pedaling with one pedal. There’s a small store at the mouth of the canyon, and I figured I’d be better off there than sitting in the canyon. So I put my left pedal and attached crank-arm in the back pocket of my jersey, supported by my windbreaker vest, and began coasting and pedaling one-legged down the canyon. Fortunately, it was all downhill for the two miles to the end of the canyon, and I was actually able to maintain a speed of about 20 mph all the way to the store. The rest of the group gave me a two-minute head start, and I was able to stay ahead of them all the way to the store. Once we got to the store, we were able to reach by cell phone the folks in Meredith’s Explorer, who were still in Estes Park, filling up with gas. We decided that Meredith and I would wait at the store for those folks to come pick us up, while T., Glen, Steve M and Geoff would ride their bikes back to Ft. C. Meredith and I had a nice visit while we waited at the store , and as it turned out, once the folks in the Explorer picked us up, dropped off Shawna first and then took me home, Theresa and Glen were just arriving at our house on their bikes. Later that afternoon, when Theresa and I went to get our overnight bags from Tom Jensen’s van, we took my bike and its detached parts with us, planning to leave those with Tom so that he could repair my bike. Tom told us that he had already heard about all our adventures, and he insisted on trying to fix my bike right away. He inspected it found that the crank-arm was not badly damaged, although scratched, and that the splines on the spindle were still good, and he was able to re-attach the crank-arm. He also did a mini-tune-up on my drive chain and then wanted to charge me only $5 for his efforts. (I gave him a $20 bill and told him to keep the change.)
Later Sunday evening, after Theresa and I had gone to Mass, we joined all the team campers at a local restaurant, had a great time eating Mexican food and drinking margaritas and then went home to bed. Okay, the story’s gone on long enough, and T.’s telling me that no one will read it all, so I’m going to close. Miss you all and can’t wait to see many of you at Vineman. |
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