IronCamp Day Five Update

Time Trial in Slovang, CA - 14.5 miles

Today's stage was a short (for the pros!) time trial effort around the town of Solvang, CA. We pre-rode the course in the morning. Actually ran into a group of CTS athletes (about 30) spinning around town w/ the guru himself, Chris Carmichael. We passed them, of course. Kinda had to, ya know? Anyway, we took a detour off of the TT course and went out to a local canyon for some solid riding. The terrain was awesome, but the roads left something to be desired. I guess when things are this remote - and the weather is this good - you don't need to consistently repair the roads.


There was a bit of wind as well...and some of the folks got crazy muddy trying to free the car of a tourist from the mud on the side of the road. I was too slow to get up the hill and missed out on all that fun, but I did snap some crazy great pictures of the local terrain. Yes, that's snow up on top of those hills!

We rode out another 25 mins from here, and then we flipped it. We returned to the TT course, climbed the technical hill and then rode the killer descent back into town. We were on road bikes and were soft pedaling...and we hit 25 miles an hour. Things got a little squirrelly when the police entourage of 14 cars and over 20 motorcycles flew by us...some managed to jump right in...others of us hitched a ride on the back. Crazy cool. After one more short hill, we were right back into town. Total ride time was 2:20, distance was 32 miles...nice and easy.


Rolling into town, we hit a local bakery for some danishes and coffee. Chilling out front, we snapped some photos of the pros zipping around and testing their equipment one more last time. Man these guys are skinny!!!! Then we ran to the hotel, got changed, and headed out...first to the expo, then onto the course to watch the extravaganza. It was pretty amazing to see the studs ripping the course up. Levi was grade A fast over the day...we watched on the jumbotron as he kept his nose to the knuckles on his aerobars through the head / crosswinds and then powered his way through the final 15k. Pretty amazing stuff. In the pic below you can not only see that Levi is working, you can also see the nice raspberry on his shin from the crash at the end of Stage One!

After the show we piled into the truck and headed down the coast to Santa Barbara in preparation for the last big stage of our tour (the pros have one more). Stay tuned!!!