The Ride
PacTour, the company providing the big tour that Paul W and I did in 2018 (blog: Robert's Northern Transcontinental bike ride 2018), also periodically offers the Ridge Of The Rockies tour. The ROTR route uses 17 riding days to go from Kalispell, Montana to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with two additional optional ride/rest days in the middle. The average ride day workload is 101 miles and 5300 vertical feet of climbing. The route proceeds along the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, touching on Yellowstone and the Tetons then stitching together Grand Junction, Durango, Taos and Santa Fe.
Signing Up
PacTour published their 2024 tour schedule toward the end of 2023. Participants need to register (and make a down payment) pretty quickly because the tour may fill up, as it did in this case. I'm sure there are business reasons for the company to want to nail things down so far in advance, but the customer also has a motive. If you are going to take on such a challenge, and if you are not one of those people who gets paid to ride their bike, then you need the time to increase your strength and endurance - to be fit enough to survive 6-8 hours of riding day after day. You can't just decide a month before such a tour that it sounds fun. At least not if you want to finish and have some semblance of fun as an ROI.
Training
So before 2024 even began to screw up my check dating, I was thinking/worrying about the activities I would do to prepare. The earliest was riding "Hell Week" in Fredericksburg Texas in late March. This inexpensive and lightly supported event is organized by the Race Across America company. A variety of ride options are on the menu, but its possible to ride seven 85-100 mile rides over as many days. Several of my bike club friends decided to sign up so what a great way to start the year! Of course that prospect put the fear of Hell into me so I trained for that with some significant rides in late February and early March.
As might be foreseen, that was a bit far in advance to maintain the high training tempo, perhaps because I was finally able to break ground on the Garage/Shop project (a construction blog will be forthcoming!). So my activities dropped off in the spring. The last 15 miles of the Hot Doggett century ride in mid July with PacTour veterans Harold and Everett made clear the urgency of a more rigorous training regimen. I adjusted my priorities to meet a goal of climbing at least 20,000 feet per week. Climbing is not my strong suit, so I figured the best training would be lots of climbing, rather than worry about the number of miles.
Here are the monthly stats for the year through August:
Month Miles Climbing Feet Hours
February......... 660 57,000 49
March...........1,140 74,000 73
April................ 370 24,000 23
May................. 750 61,000 53
June................ 390 32,000 28
July................. 680 68,000 54
August......... 1,200 111,000 93
Here are some of the highlights from the rides so far this year:
Texas
Roger R. and I traveled, roomed and rode most days together.
Intensive training: Hot Doggett to End of August
The map below showing all the rides reveals pretty complete coverage of the roads in Madison County, a couple trips up Mount Mitchell and a few in the Hendersonville area. The question I posed to myself each day was "what hill haven't I ridden up recently?" The red route flying off to the upper right is the ride to Blacksburg Virginia described in more detail below.
Two-day work-out-the-kinks run to Blacksburg, VA
Ever since son George and family moved to Blacksburg I've been imagining getting there on bicycle. The car drive up the interstate is about 180 miles. In my imagination over the years I elaborated the cool features that could be included on the route in addition to the joy of exploring new places:
- Virginia Creeper Trail - a rails-to-trails gravel path up a creek out of Damascus. I've longed to see more of since first glancing it from the car window.
- The northern side of the Mount Rogers Recreation Area, and area we've camped and hiked --- but how would it be on a bike?
- New River Trail State Park - another rails-to-trails gravel path in Virginia.
Adding those segments made the total distance around 220 miles, so I decided include a stop-over in Damascus where Charla could meet me in the car. That way I could ride my lighter, faster, more comfortable road bike from home for 90 miles for day one, then switch to my gravel bike (fatter tires) for 132 miles on day two (which includes the rails to trails segments).
On day two Harold T from Blacksburg rode down to meet and ride back with me on the New River trail. This provided the first opportunity I've had to try out the Live-Tracking-between-riders feature on the Garmin bike computer ... which proved pretty important since where we ended up meeting was exactly where a 5 mile section of the trail was closed - requiring finding my way on surface roads. Harold was able to look at his bike computer map and see where I was and which way I was taking the detour. For anybody interested in checking out this feature, be aware there are two limitations: there is no tracking info when you are riding out of your cell phone coverage area, and the linkage has to be done in advance through Garmin server side accounts.
Summary: Both days were really friggin nice (meaning scenic low traffic roads) roads until we approached the I-81 corridor at the end of day two where the combination of a serious wet-all-the-way-through downpour and substantial traffic turned 30 miles into a slog slog slog.
"Worlds shortest tunnel" on the way into Damascus
Since I have the gravel bike I can take a shortcut over the mountain ...
and find some true back country. That's Mt Rogers in the distance.
Gravel farm road.
Remote-but-paved road through national forest land
New River Trail State Park caters to horsemen.
Getting to the start
Much of this final prep is exactly the same as what I documented in my first post to the Robert's Northern Transcontinental bike ride 2018 blog, so I won't repeat all the check lists and so on. One thing that changed is that I got a hand-me-down hard-shell bike case which I used as checked baggage on the flight. That meant that I didn't have to pack and ship the bike a week in advance. So far my experience is that the airlines do a good job of handling bikes. But then the whole flight to Kalispell MT went off staggeringly well. Here's hoping that the rest of the tour goes as well!
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