LOTOJA

I WON LOTOJA!!!

OK, OK, not really of course. But after 10 hours on the bike and still being alive I felt pretty good about the victory arms at that point.

Here's my down-low on Lotoja 2006 for those who may care to know. I must say to Layne and Jami - I'm sorry you couldn't make it with your move and all - the race was incredible and I'm sure you would have had a night-and-day better experience from last year. The weather was absolutely amazing, and so compared to what everyone said about the blizzards and over half of the riders dropping out last year, everyone was very happy about that. I know there are some who claim to love it when the weather gets nasty and thrive on the challenge, but for me, the 206 miles in the saddle is definitely challenge enough at this point.

I planned to ride the day with Steve Wilson and the group that we were with which was mixed with some ogden guys and some Salt Lake guys, and the plan was great until about half way up the first climb over Strawberry Summit. It was a long grind over the first climb and Steve was able to stay with Mike Swenson and the lead pack that was driving a pretty hard pace (for me) up the first climb. I dropped off the group about half way because my heart rate was climbing steadily and at mile 50 out of 206 I didn't think it was prudent to kill myself on the first climb. Looking back that may have been a mistake, but I doubt I could have held their pace even if I wanted to at that point.

As I started to drift off the lead group I looked back and realized then that there were only 5-6 of our group of 5400's that were ahead of me and everyone else had already long been dropped, so that gave me some hope. I got over the summit fine and with decent time on my own and then was totally recovered by the time we got down the 20 mile descent into Montpelier, and I was with a group that had formed on the way down.
At the feed zone in Montpelier I nearly went down when a guy in front of me fell. I swerved around him. The second of the 3 climbs I felt great and passed a lot of people on that climb from groups in front of me, and then the 3rd pass was pretty short also and the only challenge was a steep pitch the last mile. Mile 110 felt very very good to know that the climbing was done for the day.

On the way down from the pass a group of very fast riders from behind caught up with me and Scott and we rode with them for the next 70 miles at a VERY fast pace. Mostly they pulled and I held on for dear life, which was almost threatened a couple times with some extremely close calls. One time a girl slammed her breaks and skidded right in front of me and I barely missed her wheel, and the closest incident was in Jackson Canyon when a similar thing happened, I had to quickly swerve to avoid slamming the person in front of me, and there was a guy behind me who's tire was coming up on the side of my back wheel who I clipped. He went down very hard, and I somehow stayed up. Unfortunately I lost the pack at that point and it kind of shafted me. I was on my own for the next 25 miles and I lost some time, but I finished overall in 10 hours and 5 minutes in 145th place overall out of 900+ riders which is better than I could have expected, since I went there to try to finish the race without bonking.

That's Wilson duking it out for 1st place in the 5400's with Cameron. Steve ended up taking 1st in our group at 9:46:00 overall which was very impressive. The winner overall came in at 9:15:00

It was a fantastic day! I finished feeling great, and was very glad to have had no wrecks or flats. I highly recommend doing Lotoja to anyone who likes cycling. It was phenomenal.