Post date: Mar 31, 2011 2:44:14 PM
We headed to Georgia directly from the second day of racing at University of Missouri and arrived at the wonderful hour of 4am, doing our best to allow others to sleep.
I joined the group that took a relatively easy ride on Monday afternoon and was thinking that the "descents" we were doing would be fun at speed. Little did I know that these "descents" were just ripples compared to what we would get to ride throughout the week.
Weather Tuesday took a bit of a dip with rain and fog but after putting plastic bags over our socks we headed out to do a 56 mile loop containing 3 climbs, Neels, Wolf-Pen, and Woody. Foggy descending slowed things down a bit and we arrived back at the cabin ready to relax in the hot-tub.
Wednesday was another easy day where we headed to the nearby town of Helen to relax followed by a return ride with a somewhat more motivated pace.
Thursday followed the same loop as Tuesday but having the knowledge of what was coming made the climbs much easier, not to mention descending. With clear weather the way down took much less time than I anticipated as we barely touched our brakes compared to Tuesday.
Friday was supposed to be the biggest day of the week incorporating Brasstown and I left with the group that intended to do that. I wasn't feeling it and decided to turn around just before the first climb and they pushed on.
All in all I was surprised at the amount of time that was spent riding as an individual but that is largely in part due to the disparity between riders strengths. Most of us got in over 200 miles and a good start to tan our lines (or in Waylon's case just building on them).
An uneventful drive took us back to Chicago followed by a somewhat confused Bo delivering all of us and our things to our homes.