Team Gretel & Pedal

A few weekends ago I did a bike race called Lotoja (stands for Logan to Jackson). Knowing that I myself could not ride 206 miles in under 12 hours without much more training time, I joined up with 4 of my friends to ride as a relay team. It was a really fun girls weekend and a fun ride, though marred in the end by tragedy.
Here is our old 200,000 mile truck which carried 5 bikes for us through the weekend. That was pretty awesome.

The morning was quite chilly. Summer was our first rider, all geared up!

 From left to right: Heather, Ashley, Tiffany, Me, Summer.

I rode leg 2, which was 47 miles with one big long climb. Thank goodness Ashley rode leg 3 (46 miles with 2 BIG steep climbs) and dominated. Seriously, she dominated. She passed everyone. When she came in to switch riders we were unprepared because she was 30 minutes earlier than our earliest "best case scenario" estimate! Heather rode leg 4 and Tiff rode leg 5.

Tiff getting ready to head out, waiting for Heather to come in. Ashley made this great logo so we could have team t-shirts and a big vinyl sticker on the back window of our truck.

And Heather coming in, putting the timing chip on Tiff, and Tiff about to head out.

 

We were all really happy with our times and had a lot of fun!
Ryan also did the race (the whole thing) with some friends and got his best time yet: 9 hrs 44 min. I think.

Excess details:
The tragedy I referred two in the beginning was a death, first one in 30 years of this race. Leg 5 had a lot of debris and road construction and mess on the road. About 15 miles from the finish line an experienced rider either hit-or swerved to miss-a pothole and went over the undersized guardrail over the bridge. Sadly, he did not survive. Really devastating. After that accident as everyone was trying to help, a well-intentioned person put a construction barrel over that pothole, right in the middle of the biking lane. When you are riding in a line of bikers, drafting, you can't see the road ahead. Only the biker in front of you. There are hand signals that are used to warn those behind you of obstacles, gravel, etc. Unfortunately after riding almost 200 miles people are very tired and don't always signal or react in time to signal the rider behind them. So when my last teammate came to this section, she wasn't warned of the barrel and barely clipped it and crashed. Fortunately the rider next to her was a doctor, but she was still out for several minutes. Thank goodness for helmets though. She was taken to the hospital and in the end broke nothing but got pretty severe concussion. She's a trooper though and has been really great and positive through the whole ordeal that followed.