Six Gap for Sixteen

Thanks largely to Tulane's purchase of a bunch of new bikes for the team, together with the addition of Triathlon, the collegiate club's membership count was well into the 40 when the annual Six Gap road trip was being organized. It would be my 16th trip to Dahlonega, and this year we would have a total of 16 riders. We ended up at a huge Airbnb that was large enough to handle such a group but 40 minutes from Dahlonega. On the other hand, these were luxury accommodations compared to the local Motel6, and actually less expensive. Naturally, herding 16 cats, including myself, from New Orleans to Jasper GA in five minivans was a bit of a logistical challenge, but Dylan, Josiah, and Will pulled it off rather smoothly. For the first time, we decided to drive up on Friday, giving us all day Saturday to register, get in a short ride, and prepare all of the bikes and stuff for a 5 am departure Sunday morning.

View from the deck of our Airbnb in Jasper I will spare you the hot tub photos

On Wednesday evening I got the bike set up for Six Gap with the Roadlink derailleur extender and the 12-32 cassette that I pretty much reserve just for this particular ride. I'd planned to check everything out on the Thursday morning ride, but that was rained out. I'd used this setup twice before, though, and was pretty confident there would be no problems, even through I knew the chain was a link or two shorter than it should have been. It's a bit of a kludge anyway since the gear range definitely exceeds the derailleur's actual capacity. Thursday night I packed everything up so I'd be ready to help pick up the minivans at 7:30 am on Friday. Friday morning I loaded my stuff into the Volvo, pushed the start button, and heard just an ominous low growl from the engine. Yep, the battery had chosen that morning to die. So alternate arrangements were made and after everyone regrouped at HQ we all hit the road around 8:30 or so. I was in the van with Ben and four bikes. The drive went as usual, which is to say we all stopped at Buckees in Auburn for too long, and then got stuck in traffic in Atlanta, before finally making it to the house. This place was quite an upgrade from my usual accommodations and included things like a pool table, hot tub, deck, fire pit, and gigantic master bedroom with a walk-in closet the size of a nice New York apartment.

Saturday evening dinner at Pueblos in Dahlonega

The club had a great time Friday night until around midnight while I finished reading a book and worried they might be disturbing the neighbors. On Saturday we headed over to Dahlonega and got in a nice little 20 mile ride just after a tiny bit of rain before picking up our event packets and heading over to the practically traditional pre-ride dinner at Pueblos. Given our 4:00 am wake-up plan for Sunday, everybody turned in earlier Saturday night. Six were planning on doing the shorter Three Gap ride, while the rest were registered for the 104 mile Six Gap ride. The plan was to get to the high school just as the parking lot was opened so that we could park all five vans together. Amazingly, everyone was on the same page Sunday morning and we arrived just as planned, in the dark of course, but with plenty of time to unload all of the bikes and stuff pockets with nutrition. The excitement level was high and the weather nearly perfect as the 6-gappers rolled down to the start area about 20 minutes before the 7:30 am start. The temperature was 59° with an expected high around 80°. There was a short delay to the start as the organizers delt with a tree that had fallen somewhere on the course.

Waiting for the start. There were a bit over 800 doing the Six Gap ride.

As usual the start was a little chaotic, and also as usual I was being hyper-cautious, both about avoiding potential crashes and keeping my effort level fairly low. Back in the day I would have been more in race mode, but I figure I've done my time and deserve to look at the scenery at least a little. It was spectacular, by the way. I had one full flask of Hammergel and one half full flask of Hammergel, plus one bottle with electrolyte and another with plain water. I was feeling OK for Stonepile, the "warmup gap" and Neel's, the first official gap of the six, climbing at a conservative 6-7 mph, tempered by the upcoming Hogpen climb starting at around 34 miles. I should have put a little more effort into Hogpen, but it's hard to guess where your limits are for that sort of thing when you do it only once a year and haven't been racing all summer. I thus spent a lot of time in the 4-5 mph range where the grades were in the 10-12% range. As I have for the past few years, I didn't push it at all on the downhills, and as a result was only occasionally into the 40-45 mph range, never going over 46 mph.

About ten miles after descending from Hogpen you start the climb up Unicoi. This one is a little less steep, so I was mostly in the 7-8 mph range for the steeper segments. By that time I was actually feeling a little better than I had earlier. Again, I took the descent cautiously, never dropping down onto the drops, and mostly coasting. Somewhere after that downhill I somehow shifted my chain off the outside of the cassette where it jammed against the frame, so I had to stop for a minute to dislodge it and put it back where it belonged. The worst part about that was that I had to drop out of a little group I'd been with, and ended up alone for a while.

There was a rest stop somewhere along there that I rolled past, confident that I still had a full flask of gel and a full water bottle. Although it was starting to get warm, most of the morning had been cool enough that I hadn't been drinking a huge amount of water. I was thinking I could probably make it to the finish without having to stop. So I climbed Jack's Gap next without much difficulty since it is mostly more like 6-7% in the steepest sections. After Jack's, around 65 miles into the ride, I reached back for my still full flask of Hammergel and discovered that it was missing. It must have fallen out when I pulled out the other flask earlier. So I stopped at the next rest stop at around 70 miles to refuel because there was no way I was going to make it comfortably to the finish on just water. I didn't see any gels at that stop, so I picked up some packets of gummies and filled a water bottle with Coke.

The last couple of Gaps are relatively short and quite scenic, and although I was definitely starting to feel my legs, I felt pretty good for those. I came flying down Woody Gap, my favorite descent, into the sharp downhill curve a the traffic circle, which is arguably the most fun part of the whole ride for a crit rider, and shortly after that a rider came past me at just the right speed, so I hopped on his wheel. He happily pulled me the last ten miles or so at a nice pace to the finish after which we introduced ourselves and I thanked him for the draft. So I ended up with a chip time of 6:36 and a Strava ride time of 6:33, which is about average for the last five years or so. That put me 13th in the 60+ group. There were only a handful of 70+ riders, of which I finished first for whatever that's worth. My legs were pretty well cooked by the end, and although my neck and back were hurting, they weren't as bad as they have been some years. 

Some of the local riders had spectacular rides.The fastest time this year was 4:38 (these are all chip times). Miguel Davis, who is 16, finished at 5:15 (38th overall), and Connor Prestenback, also 16, came in at 5:29. Nick was 5:36, Sam at 5:45, Apryl at 5:46, Joe Paul at 6:07, and Dustin at 6:12 among others.

The Tulane Six Gap riders did remarkably well for the most part. Liam did a very impressive 6:08 ride time, and Josiah, Ben, and Dylan all finished with faster ride times than I. We did have a couple of casualties, though. Daniel had a little crash somewhere around the turn of death, but got patched up and still finished with a chip time of 8:02. Michael abandoned somewhere along the way and had to wait a long time for a shuttle back to the high school. By the time everyone had gotten back, had something to eat at the cafeteria, got cleaned up, and got the bikes all loaded back into the vans it was probably at least 4:30 pm. The drive back was uneventful except that we all got split up because of varying fuel stops and one missed turn. All of the other vans did meet up at Buckees in Auburn, but Ben and I had needed to get gas prior to that, so we stopped at a Love's and picked up dinner there instead. Still, the late departure had us back in New Orleans after 1 am, and by the time we unloaded at HQ, dropped Ben off at his place, and returned the vans to the motor pool it was after 2:00 am. I finally hit the sack around 2:30 am. 

All-in-all it was a great trip and a big accomplishment for many of the riders, some of which are quite new to challenging rides like this one. For me, I guess it is rather inevitable that this ride seems a little harder every year, but I'm glad I can still do it.

Needless to say, I didn't get up at 5:30 am on Monday to ride. Instead, I connected the battery charger to the car battery and waited a few hours for it to charge enough that I could drive it over to Bergeron Volvo. It was also due for its 120,000 mile service, so I wasn't too surprised the next day when they told me it would be a bit over $4k to take care of everything. Still cheaper than a new car, I guess. 

Of course this sort of expense always comes when you have just bought something expensive that you didn't really need. In this case, it was a new Cervelo Soloist that was still partially assembled at home. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but it was on closeout, happened to be about my size, and was priced a couple thousand off retail, and of course the trusty Bianchi Sempre has now accumulated 132,800 miles and probably needs a rest. I had broken down and ordered a proper saw guide and blade since I had to cut down the seatpost to clear the cutout for the rear wheel. It's a 48 with 165 crankarms and an 80 mm stem, so I'm sure it will take me a while longer to sort out the position and everything. Cervelo uses the same seat tube angle on all their frame sizes, so that makes the virtual top tube longer, as it was on my old Cervelo Soloist. The head tube is considerably shorter than it is on the Bianchi, but I think the spacers with which they shipped it put it at just about the right height. Anyway, I had it put together by last night, so now I need to ride around the neighborhood a bit and fine tune the saddle height, fore-aft position, handlebar position, possibly stem length, and handlebar height if not a touch high. Of course it came with insanely wide 28mm tires that are tubeless ready but with tubes, which is to say they are super heavy, so all of that, plus the Di2 shifting and disc brakes will probably take some getting used to.

Yesterday I cut my ride short when a stick got into my rear wheel and brought me to a rather sudden stop with a broken spoke. I limped home and later called Adam at Bicycle World to see if he happened to have a replacement spoke in the correct length. He found a couple, so I rode there after work and picked them up along with a roll of rim tape, forgetting completely about the fact that the original spoke nipple had mysteriously disappeared. Amazingly a brass spoke nipple that I pulled out of a 30 year old box of Schwinn branded spokes that I'd been given by Billy Richards' son threaded on nicely, so I was able to put the wheel back into service in time for this morning's WeMoRi where my legs were still feeling a little bit of Dahlonega.