Boy, so much to talk about. The last couple of months have been off the hook. “Off the hook?” you ask. Yeah, that’s right,….the early 90s just called and they want their catch phrase back.
Early March marked what college students like to call the “Spring Break”. Perhaps you’ve heard of this exciting event: essentially a bunch of college students embark on a quest to ingest as much alcohol as physically possible, while getting extremely burned on the lush beaches of any number of exotic resorts. Not for me, my friends! I took a 6-day training trip to Greenville, South Carolina, and that place is awesome. The first two days were perfect with temps in the mid to high 70s. Not too shabby considering 40’s marked the daily standard previous to training trip. However, our luck soon failed with somewhat sub-par conditions; culminating with what was supposed to be an epic 6 hr ride. My roommate David Caughlin and I set out to bare witness to this “impossibly tough” ride of absolute attrition, with over 10,000 feet of climbing and topping off at 6,000 feet of elevation. It rained, and by rain I mean poured, and by poured I mean absolutely saturated us. But this only occurred for the first 30 minutes of the ride, just enough to completely soak both of us! The next 3-4 hours were much better, the roads on the Blue Mountain Parkway are gorgeous and challenging. Locals wave as they pass you every so gingerly, children laugh, the elderly seem a little less hard of hearing…Life is GOOD! We started the most difficult climb of the day, and about 45 minutes into the climb the temperature dropped from the mid-50s to 30 degrees! As we neared the top, snow was all around us, but we kept trucking on with complete confidence that our collegiate ignorance would somehow get us through this gloomy situation. We arrived at the top of the climb about 25 minutes later and it started to rain/sleet; a very bad situation preceding a technical descent … and not to mention we were completely underdressed!
The descent took nearly 40 minutes as we screamed down the mountainside in search of refuge, but alas, there was none. After another 40 minutes or so we finally came to a small town and stopped at a McDonalds- where we called for help. Now I’ve been riding for quite some time, and I’ve always made it a point to NEVER call for help unless absolutely necessary…sadly, this was one of those occasions! David called his uncle and about an hour later we were warm and toasty. As bad as I initially felt having to use my get out of jail free card; we were informed that there was a plethora of tornados all around the Greenville area, one of which was only 40 or so miles away in Clemson! In the end we still got close to 5 hours in with just shy of 8,000 feet of climbing, so all in all it was still a good day.
Spring Break is Great.
- Brett “I may not be quite as sweet as the White brothers…I mean, come on, those guys are sweet! But yes, definitely much cooler than John “TSK” Myers” Stewart
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