The past week I spent cruising around Oregon working the Oregon Bike Ride. Once again I got to see a lot of really cool places - we spent days in Heppner, Monument, John Day, Unity, Sumpter, and Ukiah, and I worked with a bunch of awesome people. Two of the baggage crew members working the OBR, Zoe Roy and Sarah MacCarthy, are nordies at the University of Utah, and they brought all their rollerskiing gear with them. I figured these girls must be serious skiers, so I befriended them, and soon found out that I had actually seen Zoe race before—when I watched the NCAAs at Black Mountain this year (she also went to NCAAs in 2008). I’m quite certain Sarah would have been at NCAAs this past year but she “red shirted” last season so she can have another year of eligibility. I will admit I was a bit intimidated by them, but they were both super cool and Zoe even lent me her rollerskis. Unfortunately, due to the nature of our different jobs and our break schedules we were unable to do any training together, but we did get to ride together on the layover day because we didn’t have to move camp. Our layover day was in John Day, the biggest town we stayed in. The ride was 75 miles, covered 3000 feet of elevation gain within the first 45 miles before a superfast 10 mile descent and then a 20 mile flat return. I rode with Zoe, Sarah, Amie and the Sunnyside bike group, all very experienced and speedy riders. There were nine of us riding together in a pace line. This was new to me as I’ve only ever rode with one or two other people at a time and I had never actually drafted before. Riding in the pace line for 75 miles was the toughest ride I have ever done, I was riding both the farthest and fastest I’ve ever rode. To put this into perspective, we rode 25 miles further and had 2500 more feet of cumulative elevation gain than the layover ride during the Washington Bike Ride, but it only took an hour longer. However, it was also the most fun bike ride I’ve ever been on - the roads and scenery were great (although I spent the majority of the time watching the tire of the bike in front of me and didn’t have much spare energy to enjoy the roadside views), and I learned so much from riding with these experienced riders. The group was super supportive - they would wait for me at the top of the long uphill climbs, but would still let me have the experience of taking short pulls on the flats, and they taught me how to totally rock the downhills (if only that’d help with my downhill skiing). No worries though, I won’t be converting to bike competing anytime soon - I spent the rest of the week doing recovery workouts…
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