North Shore Century Recap -Brian

Post date: Sep 17, 2010 9:31:6 PM

Some members of the Illinois Tech Cycling team recently attended the North Shore Century sponsored by the Evanston Bike Club (http://www.evanstonbikeclub.org/NSC/). The plan was to leave at 6:00am to head north to the starting location at Evanston High School. Louis, Ian, and myself rolled over to the red line and headed north, me feeling relieved that we would take the train rather than tack an extra 20 miles on to start as it was quite a brisk morning. We arrived, met up with Bo and received our wrist bands from registration and left again shortly. I was amazed how well Bo seemed to know the route as he shouted out turns that seemed to be unmarked, but after some time began noticing the bright orange arrows on the ground. We slowly picked up the pace and began racking up the miles, without a computer to look at I was surprised when the first stop came up. The rest stops had refreshments, bike mechanics, plenty of food and even miniature Clif-Bars. After stocking up and chatting for a little we continued on as the day grew warmer. The pace stayed up over the next few stops until we met up with some of the riders from University of Chicago team and slowed a to talk a bit. The pace again picked up and we eventually arrived at the velodrome, unable to actually ride it as people were there practicing. Being about the halfway point we circled and returned along a route along the lake, and after a few missed turns were back to counting down the miles. We rounded out with a rolling time short of 6 hours and plenty of time spent relaxing at the rest stops, ice cream at the finish, and another train ride back south. All in all it was a beautiful day and plenty of time on the bike to reinforce those wonderful tan lines.