Glenwood Springs

Glenwood Springs

Christine and I spent last weekend in Glenwood Springs for some racing and hanging out and we had a great time.


Friday afternoon we drove out to Glenwood Springs after lunch so I could check out the course. I’ve never done this race before, and I was glad to get a chance to check it out in advance. It’s a beautiful course, following the Colorado River through rolling hills.

After the pre-drive, I checked Twitter and saw this from Lance Armstrong:

Had a good ride w/ @levi_leipheimer this AM. Doing a TT tonight in Carbondale. +/- 10 miles.

The TT was part of the race weekend I was attending, and we were on our way there to pick up my race number. (Lance lives and trains in Aspen right now, and Carbondale is just down the road.) When we got to the TT, there was no Lance in sight and I just figured they had already raced or decided not to. As we were walking back to the car, I saw someone in Astana colors and quickly pulled out my camera to snap this pick of Levi and Lance riding to the starting line.

That’s probably the closest I’ll ever be to Lance. Until I stalk him in Austin, of course.

The weather Saturday morning was perfect for the race. I was just on the edge of being cold, but I warmed right up when we started racing. I don’t have a lot of racing miles in my legs this year and it really shows when I ride in a tight group. We had 50+ people on narrow road, and I was a big stressball. I couldn’t wait for things to thin out a bit. Half of this race is on dirt roads, and people spread out a bit when hit the dirt.

Water bottles were bouncing off bikes left and right. I almost lost one of mine, but I managed to catch it between my leg and the bike frame. There was a good pile-up on the dirt too, but I managed to avoid it. Apparently a lot of people hadn’t checked out the course in advance because 10 or 15 of them took a wrong turn. Sucks to be them, but they caught up quickly. In the feed zone, there was another crash. I’m not sure what happened, but somebody ended up breaking a frame.

By the time the group started heading back to the finish line with 30 miles to go, we were down to 15 or so people. A few more caught our group and we were up to around 20. I wasn’t so lucky with my water bottle on the return trip and I ended up losing one. Of course, it was the one that I hadn’t used yet, so that meant I was doing a 55 mile RR with one bottle of water. Nice.

I was riding pretty comfortably, but I couldn’t make my way up to the front of the group. There was just no room to squeak through. Or, more accurately, there was no little gap I was willing to squeeze through. By last year at this time, I had at least a few hundred race miles under my belt and was way more comfortable navigating a pack. I ended up finishing with that group, 18th overall. I’m happy to have finished in the lead group, but I know I was strong enough to out sprint a lot more people. Something to look forward to next year.

Saturday night we met up with some of Christine’s coworkers who were in town for the start of Ride the Rockies. We had dinner and drinks at the Glenwood Canyon Brewing Company. I had met Christine's boss once a long time ago, but it was nice to meet her again along with a couple other coworkers.

I wasn’t really feeling like rubbing elbows in a crit, so I skipped it Sunday morning. Christine and I enjoyed a nice bike ride to the crit course and watched some racing. After seeing the sketchiest crit corner ever, I was glad that I wasn’t trying to go through it 4-wide with other racers.

Over Saturday and Sunday, we managed to stop at all the I-70 rest areas in Glenwood Canyon (which the signage informed as was the “most celebrated piece of the interstate highway system”). We didn’t intend to check them all out, but we had some time to kill and wanted to check out the river. If you’re in the area, I would skip the Shoshone exit. It’s pretty much just a boat launch underneath the highway.

It was a great weekend. The race went well, the weather was great, and I got to spend the weekend with Christine. Even better, she’s home with me all this week too.