Six Gap Nine

Early on Saturday I headed up to Dahlonega, Ga. with six Tulane riders and Dustin for the annual Six Gap Century. I was still feeling pretty beat-up from the crash on Tuesday with bandages all over my right elbow and knee, that long scrape on my back, a sore neck, and various bruises in seemingly random places. On the plus side, the weather was looking like it would be warm and sunny. Being right at the end of September, this ride has offered up all sorts of weather conditions over the nine years I've been doing it. This year was the warmest yet, but under the circumstances I wasn't complaining.

The 9-hour drive went pretty smoothly except for the gas shortage in Georgia that caused us to try a second gas station. With premium gas apparently non-existent, the Volvo would have to make do with a tank of regular. This year we were right on schedule and despite getting stuck in traffic going through Atlanta arrived at packet pick-up at around 5:30. They had moved up the criteriums by at least an hour, so when we arrived the Cat. 1/2/3 race was already in progress. I stopped for a minute to chat with Debbie Milne who was launching her "Supra" line of nutritional food bars, which were pretty good. She had just finished winning the Women's race and would win the Women's KOM the next day. We headed over to Pueblo's for dinner and then made the drive over to Gainesville where the hotel was. In order to get to the parking lot in time the next morning we planned on getting up at 5 am, which I knew was not going to fool my internal clock that was still on Central time. To make matters worse, I didn't get a lot of sleep because of some sort of nasal congestion.  I must be allergic to something that was in the air around there.

Pueblo's in Dahlonega

Anyway, everyone was remarkably, surprisingly, on time and so we had time to stop at the local Starbucks before heading off to find a parking space at the school.  That worked out quite well too, and we easily got a couple of parking spots in the middle of the huge parking lot. There were four of us in the Volvo and another four in a rented minivan for this trip. Ben Bradley had been kind of training for this ride since medical school responsibilities had been interfering with his racing this year, so he was anxious to get down to the starting line early.  I stationed myself just behind the "6-hour" line with Quentin, Cameron, Ben S., and Jerry, and where I also found Adrian and Steve J.

Looking pretty good post-ride

The start was the usual minor chaos, but somehow most of us stayed pretty close together for the first ten or fifteen miles. Ben, Dustin and Sven were up ahead, and I never really saw them once we started. I was happy to find that my left hand wasn't bothering me as much as I'd feared. The right knee was a little uncomfortable, and I knew my neck would eventually be an issue, but in general I felt pretty good. Even so, given the prior week's events, my plan was basically to cause myself as little additional pain as possible. That meant climbing at a relatively easy, steady pace without necessarily trying to keep up with everyone else. I was probably climbing about 1-2 mph slower than normal, which was unfortunate since normal for me is still pretty slow. However, the plan was indeed keeping me largely within my comfort zone, which for me seemed to be around 85-88% of maximum heart rate or in the  vicinity of 160-162 bpm. There were a couple of brief jumps into the 90% range, but they were few and far between. This strategy, while certainly not conducive to impressive climbing speed or finishing time, was successful in keeping me more or less out of the red for the duration. 

Age and ride times - how sad!

This year there was fresh new asphalt on the Hogpen descent, which was a vast improvement over prior years, and although I got stuck behind a couple of cars on the downhills, they were fun as usual. Strava showed a max speed of 55.5 mph, but mostly I was looking at speeds more in the area of 45 mph. The climbs of course were a different matter altogether. For those I spend a huge amount of time in the 4-7 mph range, quite a bit slower than I'd have liked, but I really wasn't in the mood to push it much harder than that on the steep sections. At one point I shifted to the small ring and something kind of jammed up in the drive train and I stopped to see what had happened.  I never figured it out, though.  I think perhaps the chain had gotten jammed up against the anti-chain drop thing or something.  I was afraid that something had either broken or was about to break, since I was still a little paranoid about the bike because of the crash earlier in the week. Anyway, after checking it all out for a minute or two, I got going again without incident.

Damn, statistically significant (F-test p-value: 0.0118)!

The day started out in the mid-60s and ended in the low 90s, so toward the end it was starting to feel kind of hot.  After the last long descent, I finally looked at my ride time and realized how far behind I was actually running. With ten miles to go I didn't need to do much math to know there was no way I'd be finishing near the six hour mark, which I generally consider as my goal.  Of course, this year I'd intentionally thrown that goal out the window from the start, so it wasn't a surprise. Thanks to day's strategy, my legs were actually feeling remarkably good, so the last ten miles that are usually pretty painful were a lot more enjoyable this year.  This is the section of the ride where I'm always passing a ton of riders who did the shorter 5-gap ride and are, in some cases, moving really slowly.  Anyway, I finished up with an official time of 6:13:22, which I guess was OK under the circumstances.  Ben B. just killed the course and finished with the 5th fastest time at 5:21:17 which was pretty impressive. On the long ride back home I started wondering just how many times I'd ridden Six Gap, and how my results have changed, so I went back through the old blog and found a pretty significant correlation between age and finishing time. Sad but true.