Salt to Saint Relay 2009

Salt to Saint 2009

It reminded me a lot of the slumber parties I had with my friends in my youth, or the scout campouts with all the guys in my ward. It was a fun and crazy cycling marathon. We stayed a wake all night long laughing, joking, mocking, eating junk food, drinking cokes, telling stories, and doing many individual time trials.

This was supposed to be a team relay race of 385 miles from Salt Lake to St. George. It ended up being a fun ride of about 398 miles. Because of the accident in American Fork canyon during the 1000 Warrior ride, the permits needed to make this a sanctioned event became impossible to get in the time leading up to the ride. So the organizers decided to just hand out maps for the remaining teams that wanted to do it as a fun ride. It was scheduled to start Friday at noon and go all night. We were told that some other teams decided to leave a little earlier. We decided to leave at noon.

As we prepared to leave Jerry Bergosh showed up and sent us off with a cheer. The four team members were Adam, Brent, Stan, and Rogers. Stan started the first leg and had to ride from Liberty Park to the foot of Suncrest. We decided to split the Suncrest climb up into two sections so that we didn’t destroy anyone’s legs too early. I took the first leg of Suncrest and Adam took the hard section at the top and took us over and all the way out to Saratoga. I then took a 20 mile leg on the back side of Utah Lake with Stan working with me on the last ten miles. Then Brent continued on to Payson with Stan going with him the first 10 miles. We decided to break Mt. Nebo into 3 legs with Adam, Brent, and I taking turns. We made it over the top and Brent took us down while there was still daylight.

At Nephi I took over again, but we were starting to lose day light and it was time for the lights and reflective clothing. An unfortunate side effect of the reflective clothing for me was that it messed up my heart rate monitor and speedometer. The rest of the guys were in the truck and were following me when all of sudden they disappeared. Later I found out they stopped at a Burger King because the earlier stop at Subway just wasn’t enough, or was Burger King, because later we hit McDonald’s too. For the next 150 miles or so after Nephi it felt like we were almost always going slightly uphill except for a few small descents. We rotated about every hour. Adam had to swerve to miss a large rattle snake on the side of the road. As the night progressed and our tiredness increased, talk of Jackalopes, crop circles, and strange people(Aliens?) on the side of the road crept into our increasingly funny comments. We had to explain to a Highway Patrol what we were doing. I am not sure we even knew what we were doing. The roads were almost completely empty from midnight to about 6 a.m.

Between about 3:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. we hit freezing conditions with the thermometer hitting as low as 27 degrees. I shook for 40 minutes after my leg and my toes screamed obscenities at me while they defrosted. Finally we had a long section of downhill to Mt. Carmel Junction. Stan took most of the climb up to Zions Canyon and illegally rode through the long tunnel where he claims the truck sounded like a tank chasing him.

We learned all sorts of trivia about the Sun from our very own Solar Encyclopedia, Stan. It turns out that if you give that guy 400 milligrams of caffeine and deprive him of sleep there is no stopping him.

Brent took us down Zions Canyon and I finished the last leg into St. George. We finished 398 miles in 21 hours and 11 minutes which is about 18.8 miles an hour average. We celebrated by eating at Denny’s and kicking back in a hot tub. It was a blast to spend the night with such awesome team mates. It will be an experience I will always remember, but it was sooo nice to lay my head on a pillow and finally get a few hours of shut eye.