Day 3 (from Day 5)
Apologies for the radio silence – it turns out that our last few camp sites have been not only sans internet, but also outside of cellular range. Now, days later, we couldn’t be farther from the backwoods – I’m writing from outside a coffee shop in Vail. I only have a little while, so I’ll try to hammer off a few quick updates from the past 3 stages. First…
Stage 3: Leadville to Camp Hale
Distance: 24 miles, 1815 feet
Climbing: 2930 feet
The stage out of Leadville – highest town in North America – was the Queen Stage of the race, stealing the descriptor from the Tour de France: at ~40 km it was the longest stage of the TRR. At the end of it, I was ready to find a Western Union to wire Wendy her dough – Aviva was the strength of the team on this day.
She’d be the first to admit she wasn’t feeling all-powerful at the beginning of the day. Stage 2 had put the fear into her, and a bad tent sleep didn’t help the start line confidence one bit. With little else to do, we stuck to our usual plan and started off super-conservatively, making our way along a few miles of pavement before hitting double track and ramping upwards. The climbs on this stage were nothing spectacular, but the rising heat (again, just for we soft Canadians) had us further conserving. That is, until Carter (masculine) got hit with a small case of the competitive streak he used to wear around regularly in his more-active days. We found ourselves climbing with a mixed team two places up the standings from us; I, figuring they were looking a little haggard and we were looking … less so …, decided to push the issue a little. Interesting things happened: (1) we dropped them; and (2) Aviva stopped speaking to me. The connection only became clear to yours truly miles later. A few further miles later it also became clear that Aviva was right – we shouldn’t have pushed early. At around 3.5 hours, my wheels started to come off and teams around us slowly began taking advantage. Thankfully, Aviva and I had agreed on my mistake (:-)) and we relaxed into our rather depleted state and trudged along. The scenery didn’t hurt: apart from the final three flat, exposed (read: hot and nasty) miles, the last portion of the stage was run along the Colorado Trail, a beautiful lowland portion of the Continental Divide Trail.
Licking our wounds (okay, mostly me doing the licking – Aviva looked great at the end), we rolled into the finish at around 5:16 (as I recall). Knowing the next stage was a relatively short up-and-over, we decided to take it as a rest day, mindful of the two back-to-back long days to come.
