Friday, May 8, 2009

day21 66 miles dayton,nv

Sorry about that last post I was hurrying to finish up before they kicked me off the computer. I should have elaborated on the thoughts I had while climbing. I also misspelled a lot of words at the end. I won't let time constraints sacrifice the quality of my writing in the future.

Woke up and I replaced my broken spoke. It was on the nondrive side. I had to take off amy cassette to get to it. I have no idea how tight its supposed to be. I just tightened it until it 'felt' about as tight as the other spokes on that side. The only thing I know is that drive side spokes are tighter than non drive side. Tht exhausts my knowledge of wheel trueing. We all rolled out at 9 am all bundled up and I was wearing my bandana for the descent. Still had about 500 feet of climbing before we hit the top of carson pass, 8500 ft. Shawne and I had dropped frank just after starting and stopped to wait for him. A little while after frank caught up with us a highway patrolman stopped and told us 'You can't sit here in the road, you will get hit by a car ' and drove off. Nice to see you too. We decided to get to the top all together and I wound up in front doing a nice slow tempo. I didn't want to drop anybody because this moment was to important for all of us. At this altitude its ahrd to get a full breathe. It feels llike you can't get a nnice deep breath. Its because there is less air pressure and you can't get as much oxygen into your lungs. We finally crested the last little bit and high fived as we saw the carson pass signpost. Melody had driven up behind us and we took a bunch of pictures. This is the highest I have ever been and I only used my legs to get me here. Amazing. Shawne had a camera that he mounted to his handlebar/stem and was going to tape the descent. The pavement was good and I led off down the mountain. Shawne said he hit 54m.p.h and I was pulling away from him. I was in a pretty good tuck and just tried to not let the wind push me around to much. The trick with descending is that you just turn your brain off. The last thing you think about is falling off. You go down at these speeds and they are going to scrape you off the pavement anyway, so don't think about it and be loose and relaxed. I probably hit the high fifties and might have flirted with 60m.p.h. The first 15 miles or so I pretty much soft pedalled except for that climb to the top of carson pass. The border into nevada was lame. It was just a signpost with nevada on one side and california on the other with a white stripe across the road. I stopped in Genoa to change and had a blueberry ice cream cone. Stopped in carson city to get some money and found a bike shop where I got an extra spoke, 2 water bottles, nuun and some clif blocks. The guy at the shop was nice enough to fiddle around with my bike computer and got it working again. Stopped in the library and updated my blog. Camped at dayton state park and met a guy who wrote a little article about highway 50 that was published about 12 years ago. He gave me some tips on some places to stop along the way. I won't be leaving 50 for a looong time. I broke another spoke today sometime and changed it out after dinner. I was looking at my maps and didn't realize tht Colorado is like 900 miles away. Had a strong tailwind for most of the day.

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