ALC: days 6 & 7

Sorry for the delay on this final post... things just got a bit hectic with traveling home and what not.

I will start off talking about day 6. Day 6 was fairly uneventful. It was a pretty casual ride through LA suburbs to ventura. The views in santa barbara and ventura were pretty nice, seeing the beach and all. As for the actual ride, my knee was feeling a lot better that day, but I wasn't pushing it. I ended up pace lining with a group of about 6 people dressed up as pink squirrels. No joke. They probably saved my knee to be honest. It was amazing how fast they were riding for being in full pink squirrel suits. Anyway, I paced them for about 40 of the 86 miles we rode that day.

Day 7, my knee was feeling almost 100% so I went for it. I paced with 2 dudes from one of ALC's most notorious teams, team popular, for the first 20 miles. We were rolling pretty hard keeping about a 21mph pace. I was pretty excited about that. However, right after that first 20 mile stretch the ALC staff decided for safety purposes that no one would be allowed to pass on the PCH. Unfortunately for anyone riding faster than 10mph... the rest of the day was on the PCH. So for the next 40 miles riders could only go as fast as the slowest person. This got extremely obnoxious really fast. They employed this rule due to a large number of accidents the previous day. However, in my opinion it was far more dangerous to not allow people to pass. This created HUGE lines behind slower riders, not to mention put a large amount of stress on these riders when they looked back and saw a mile+ long line of riders wishing they could get around them.

Luckily, toward the end of the day people were pretty much over it and just started passing. The day would probably never end if that didn't happen. The entire ride that day was about 64 miles. Our whole team met up at the lunch stop and cruised the last 16 miles in to town together. It was really nice to ride in to the finish line as a squad. The finish line experience was actually really fun. ALC had set up a barricade about a mile long for all of the riders to ride through to the closing ceremonies. On both sides of the barricades there were tons of people cheering us on. It was actually really fun. I felt like we had won some sort of race.

Anyway, that is how the last couple of days went. I will write one more post describing my impressions of the event soon! So stay tuned!