Two days ago I rode the last 50 miles the 1000 Warriors route (which has most of the climbing).  Today our daughter and her family, who are visiting, wanted to go to Park City so I thought it would be a good chance to ride home and get in the first 45 miles of the route.

Some notes from today’s ride.  There is a small climb right near the start. After a short platueau another climb of about 600 feet.  Then a very fast descent, where my speeds reached 41 mph.  I remember doing this last year in the dark because we started at 5:54 am.  Then another long climb, but not steep.  Then another descent down to Kamas.  Watch out for the rumble strips.  There is a nice shoulder on the road but if you hit the rumple strips you are in for a surprise because they are deep and rough.   After some flat riding, a series of 3 climbs before plunging down toward Midway.  None of the climbs are steep (I did them all in the big chain ring using a double crank).

The roads through Midway were nice but when you end back on Highway 189, it is not pleasant.  The first part has a fairly good shoulder, but there are at least 5 miles with no shoulder and heavy traffic.  I think last year on the race there was less traffic because it was early in the  morning.  You would think once you hit highway 189 it would be down hill but that was not the case.  It is more like rollers.  Once you finally start to head down you come to the Alpine Loop turn within 2 miles.  So much for the downhill.  Today I had a headwind and of course I was riding solo, so my times were not as fast as the race last year.

I patched together the two separate training rides and compared that with the actual splits from last year’s race.  Because of some changes in the course I did a bit of back fitting on last year’s splits so the climb up Suncrest starts where this year’s route turns onto it and the climb up Sunbird starts from the junction of highway 209 and 210.  Last year we could not take the highway 209 shortcut.

So if I can do similar to my training rides, I will do about like I did last year.  You will notice that today I was slower than last year’s race but my training ride two days ago was faster.  Of course for the later part of the course my training ride started with fresh legs, not 45 miles of cycling.

Categories: Warrirors Race TofU
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