Fun While It Lasted

Last weekend was the annual Six Gap Century Race Ride up in Dahlonega, GA. For the last few years we've put together a number of people from the club to make the trip and kind of cap off the road racing season with this ride.  At 104 miles and five or six long climbs, this ride can be approached as a long fun challenge or as a long hard race.  It's your choice, and for a lot of people the choice changes after the first or second climb.  On Friday we had no fewer than ten people lined up for the trip.  By the time we actually left on Saturday morning it was down to five.  I was driving up with David and Graeme and we would be staying with Pat and Steve at a friend's house there in Dahlonega who has graciously hosted us for the last few years.  The forecast for Sunday's ride was calling for nice temperatures and a chance of rain, but compared to the climbing the weather was the least of our concerns.

The eight hour ride on Saturday was uneventful, landing us in town with lots of time to get registered, check out the Expo, buy a ton of energy gels, and watch one of the criteriums before heading over to our host's place for a great dinner.  Sunday morning we were up early, arriving as usual in the dark to get a parking spot in the school lot with enough time left over to pump up tires and otherwise get our acts together.  I hid the car key in its usual spot and the three of us rolled down the sidewalk past hundreds of other riders, inserting ourselves into the mix just behind the "under 6 hours" sign.

The start was fairly smooth and for the next fifteen miles or so it was the usual battle to stay reasonably close to the front, which in this case meant there were only a hundred or so riders ahead of us.  I lot track of Graeme and Steve right away, but could see David up ahead of me now and then. The first climb is Neel's gap, about 6.5 miles long and 1,500 feet.  Although it's long it feels fairly smooth.  I was just staying among the people around me for this one, and I'm sure a group probably raced off the front, but at any rate I found I was quite comfortable with a 39x23 for much of the distance.  The next climb is Jack's Gap, which is shorter but seems a little steeper. I rode my own pace up this one, and let a lot of riders ride away from me on that one, but as usual I bombed the downhill with a few others and by the end of the descent was back in a fairly sizable group.  Soon we were climbing Gap #3, Unicoi, which like Jack's has some pretty steep sections but is relatively short at around 2.5 miles.  Of course, on all of these climbs I was looking at speeds in the 8-12 mph range. Near the top of Unicoi most of the group was well ahead of me, but I knew that this was one of the longer downhills so once I came over the crest I went straight from the 39x25 to the 53x12. I got together with another rider who was doing the same thing and we flew down the first part together at 40-48 mph, but then we got stuck behind the line of cars that was itself stuck behind the re-forming group that we'd been with at the start of the climb.  It took us a long time to work our way past all of the cars on the narrow winding mountain road, but finally we made contact as the road flattened out and the speed dropped back below 30 mph.  I was really glad to be back with a group leading up to the long 7 mile, 1,800 foot climb up to Hogpen Gap. As the group started to bunch up a bit approaching a right-hand turn I coasted past the rider who had accompanied me on the downhill and commented, "that was fun!"  A few seconds later I was lying on the ground thinking, "Crap, it's broken."  Coming around the turn just a bit before the start of the Hogpen climb, I'd moved to the outside of the group to avoid hitting the brakes.  Unfortunately there was a little patch of sandy gravel right in the middle of the turn and when my front tire hit it, it completely washed out, dumping me immediately onto my head, right shoulder and right forearm. I was still holding onto the handlebar when I hit it was so fast.  In fact, it was almost exactly like the crash I'd had in Lafayette except that this time I broke a collarbone instead of a few ribs.  Yes, I was pissed.  I'd been having a really fun ride and was looking forward to the challenging climb up Hogpen, but there I was, alone in the middle of nowhere.  "Oh well," I thought.  "It was fun while it lasted." 

I walked over to the side of the road with my bike and leaned over it for a little while taking inventory.  I knew immediately that the collarbone was broken. I could feel the broken ends of the bone grinding against each other.  My head felt OK, although I'd hit it pretty hard, but the helmet, now broken in a few places, had done its job.  The group went around the curve and for a little while I was left alone to contemplate my next move.  I was right at the bottom of two climbs, each with a rest area at the top.  I got back on the bike and figured I'd ride slowly toward Hogpen as long as I could and then hope to flag down someone associated with the ride to get a lift back to the cars.  I hadn't ridden more than a few hundred meters when Graeme and a few others came by asking what had happened since I was riding slowly with one hand on the bars. Just then one of them recognized a car approaching from behind and flagged it down.  It was a woman and her kids who was driving the course supporting her husband who had been in the same group I'd been in.  She offered me a ride to the top, so we put the bike on the rack and took off.  A mile or two later we were picking our way though a long string of riders going 10 mph.  It was slow and tricky passing riders one at a time on the narrow road.  She stopped to hand her husband a bottle and then we continued up to the top where I got out and tracked down someone from the ride to see if I could get a ride back to the parking lot.  Their policy was to prohibit race volunteers from transporting anyone who was injured, so although my bike got a free ride back, I had to wait for an ambulance, which was a terrible waste of an ambulance.  At least I got to cheer on a number of people I know as they came over the top, and just as I was getting into the ambulance David rode up, so I gave him my transponder to return to the event folks.  When they loaded me in I glanced over to see one of them unwrapping a it to start an IV.  Really?  I asked what they thought they were doing that for, and they really did not have an answer, so I told them to stop.  Anyway, it was a long ride to the hospital in Dahlonega.

The ER was fairly quiet so I was all x-rayed and finished before the others had finished their rides.  They had put me in a sling, which is marginally better than nothing, and handed me a CD with the x-rays, so I waited in the waiting room for about an hour until Graeme and David could get over there to pick me up.  By the time were ate something it was starting to rain. I had taken some hydrocodone, so Graeme was put in charge of driving.  The weather got worse and worse as the night wore on, and by 10:30 or so we decided it would be safer and smarter to book a room in Montgomery and finish the drive in the morning, so we checked into a nice Hampton Inn.  By 4:15 am the next morning we were on the road again, but the weather didn't seem much better.  I checked the radar on the iPad and knew we'd have a couple more hours of driving in the dark and rain.  Just to twist the knife, one of the headlights burned out.  Luckily, I had a spare bulb in the car, so we were able to stop at a gas station and, thanks to David's skinny arms, change out the bulb and gas up for the final push.  It was about 9:30 am when I got home.  I rushed off to a 10:00 funeral and then headed to work where I got just a little bit done when I wasn't nodding off from the narcotics.  Yesterday I went to see Dr. Savoie at Tulane's sports medicine institute who suggested we put me into an x-brace and see how things look a week from now.  We will probably be able to avoid surgery for this one if things look like they are progressing.  In the meantime, it's kind of hard to type and get dressed and write, and I've been using the mouse with my left hand a lot, but the pain is not very bad as long as I stay still.  Guess I'll be off the bike for a while.  Naturally the weather should be spectacular.....