6-Gap Crawling, Coasting, and Charging

Earlier in September it seemed that things had conspired to prevent my 13th appearance at 6-Gap. A month earlier the Tulane Cycling club had already gotten hotel rooms reserved near Dahlonega and the stage was set for another road trip in the motor pool minivans. For my own part, I wasn't thinking too much about the ride this year after having missed it last year entirely, but I was figuring I'd be helping with the driving and doing the ride nonetheless. Then there was Hurricane Ida. Off-campus students evacuated, the hurricane hit harder than expected, some of the generators in Tulane's co-generation plant failed, on-campus students were evacuated, campus was closed for repairs, and so the planned trip went by the wayside. At that point I was kind of resigned to missing 6-Gap again, kind of in the way you might resign yourself to missing a root canal. Then, just a week or so before the ride, Steve asked if I wanted to go. I could stay with him, Pat, and Chris at a friend's house right there in Dahlonega. I wasn't too keen on driving my car up there since it's way overdue for 100,000 mile maintenance (I have an appointment for the end of October), but then Chris offered to give me a ride with him in his Tesla, so rather suddenly things kind of fell into place. I put my special 6-Gap cassette onto the race wheels and rode them on the Thursday ride to make sure everything was shifting OK because 6-Gap is one ride where you are guaranteed to use every single gear combination on the bike and wish for more. Then on Friday night I decided to clean the bike and discovered a slash in the front tire through which I could see the inner tube, a situation that could be catastrophic on a fast twisty descent. Luckily, I had a brand new tire on hand. When I removed the bad tire I found that the rim strip had shifted, exposing parts of a couple of spoke holes. That alone could also have caused a blowout. So I re-centered the tape and put everything back together and the bike was all ready, or so I thought.

Chris picked me up early on Saturday and we were on the road by 6 am for what would turn out to be a very long but interesting road trip. I think we stopped about five times to charge the battery along the way, so we didn't arrive at Ro's house until around 8 pm thanks to that and the time zone difference. Still, it was a nice drive and I learned a lot about Teslas.

Thanks to being so close to the high school, we got to the venue nice and early on Sunday morning with plenty of time to get a good parking spot and pick up packets and get organized for the 8:00 am start. I staked out a spot near the front of the rapidly growing group at the start line and all of us were ready to go.

 This ride always starts out kind of fast and sketchy since it seems like all of the first few hundred riders somehow think they are going to be able to stay with the front group if they can just pack themselves tighter together, while at the same time the actual fast riders have good reason to create a split between themselves and the packfill like me. So by the time we were five miles out Chris and Steve were up in that front group and almost out of sight as the rest of the group started to settle down. Then, on the first little downhill, I was surprised to feel a clump, clump, clump coming from my front wheel. I looked at it carefully to see if the bead was about to blow off the rim, but it didn't look too bad. As it turned out, one section of bead was kind of stuck farther down inside the rim than it should have been. At any rate, it definitely kept me from getting too aggressive on the downhills, which was probably a good thing anyway.

This year the top half of the ride was to be done in reverse, so the steep Hogpen climb would be the second climb of the day. Although it was steeper from that direction (like 10-20%), it was considerably shorter (like 2.5 miles). I had some concerns about that, however, since my lowest gear was a 39x28, which was barely sufficient for short 10% grades and definitely insufficient for 20% grades. My legs had similar limitations. Going in I had decided to just ride my best steady tempo on the climbs, best described as crawling, and use the downhills for recovery, best described as coasting. Of course, with over a thousand riders it isn't too hard to find little groups or individuals going just the right speeds on the climbs to help pace inexperienced climbers like me, so the first Gap went by without much damage. 

As it turned out, I liked the Hogpen climb better from this direction despite the steeper grade, and despite the fact that I was badly over-geared. I spent most of that climb at a cadence of about 40 rpm, seated, which was at least smooth and steady, but was not unsurprisingly doing a number on my lower back. Still, I survived Hogpen feeling a little better than I'd feared. The rest of the ride was basically crawl up the climb, coast down the downhill, find a little group to draft on the flatter sections, and repeat. I'd been looking forward to my favorite downhill, the last one, that is long and swoopy and smooth, and was quite disappointed to have to go down it almost entirely on the brakes because of a U-haul truck and car ahead of me all the way. By then my upper back and neck were killing me despite the 12-hour Aleve I'd taken in the morning and the other 12-hour Aleve I'd taken four hours later at around 50 miles, but really no worse than usual and definitely not a surprise (hence the Aleve!).

So I finally rolled in at an official chip time of 6:25:24, having stopped at none of the rest stops and with one of my water bottles still almost half-full, and generally feeling pretty decent under the circumstances. I'd gone through the equivalent of about four Hammergels, not counting the coffee and Scratch bar I'd had before the start. Chris, on his first 6-Gap experience, turned in a 6:12 chip time, but his actual riding time was 5:56, which was pretty great. Steve had a chip time of 6:10 with a 6:07 ride time, and Pat as usual stopped at a lot of the rest stops taking pictures and stuff and came in at 7:36.

This year, for the first time, I stayed overnight on Sunday. Chris and I headed out around 5:30 am for a smooth and uneventful ride back with Chris taking a conference call and me updating the COVID data, arriving back home around 6:30. I think that all-in-all it was one of the least stressful 6-Gap rides I've ever done. Considering my lackadaisical approach, I was surprised at my time that I'd expected would be closer to 6:45. In fact, it was pretty much right in line with my times from other recent years. While we were sitting in the high school cafeteria eating the usual spaghetti and meat sauce and salad and sweet tea I got to talk with Patrick Hennessey who I hadn't seen since forever. He was a Junior when he raced here a long time ago and has recently started riding again, apparently quite strongly since he finished well under 6 hours. I also got to take with Debbie Milne, who has had a pretty good year racing-wise this year with her Supra team and was there shepherding some of her development team members.