Tour is great, I'm loving it. Today was the longest ride so I drank a ****load of beers after. I've had a shower and rest now.

http://app.strava.com/activities/52969192

Could have worked waaaaay harder than today, wasn't even my fastest century. Started on my own, kicked ass for 25 miles. My room mate found me at first rest stop and was struggling a little. IT band issues still maybe but also training deficit. We piddled along at 15-16 until we joined up with another small group and started doing 18-19. That worked until roommate got a cramp about 20 miles before the end. We slowed to about 16 for the rest.

I think I could have averaged 19 mph easy but basically not willing to drop people I hook up with. Heart rate and power never got out of cruise level today.

Tour has been well organized and I'll probably do I again next year. Tomorrow is an easy 75 miles.

Good stuff, Rusty, sounds like a lot of fun!

This makes no sense.

I know, right. But its a sight seeing day... the are begging us to take it easy, go to the Tabasco museum and some state park or something. Anyway today at like mile 80 I was thinking, if today was only 75 miles, it would be sooooo easy. Its the shortest day of the tour.

Sounds like they want you to have an active recovery day. You are doing great, go go go!

Very relaxed ride today. Rode with same group as yesterday and they were tiiiied. I felt good and in a few.spots I'd Sprint ahead a few miles and wait for them. I plan to bust my ass last day.

I'll try to remember to add strava link when I get back to my room, but anyway its on my profile. Tomorrow is another

Whoops meant to say, tomorrow is another 85 miles

I can't tell if I have legit beefs or if I'm just full of bile but there are many things I am sick to death of. Right now I am sitting outside my hotel room occasionally banging on the door trying to rouse my room mate, who apparently has both keys. That guy...

Day 5/6. I put the hammer down in the first stage and averaged maybe 21 mph for 20 miles. I was maybe 60s behind the lead group and I ground my way from the very back.

Spent rest of day with usual group, averaging about 18 mph for the day. Tomorrow I am gonna ride on my own and see if I can't finish an hour earlier than normal.

5 days in the saddle sending you stir crazy?

Maybe. You see the same people over and over, and after a while their bad habits start to bug the **** out of you. There is a lot of cluelessness too.

Anyway its currently pouring down rain, we're set to ride in under 2 hours, not sure what they do if it rains this bad. We're talking zero visibility, lightning right outside the window.

Well, we're done. Actually like 7 miles to go but its raining hard and going to get worse, so they're hauling our asses in.

Full trip report incoming in a day or two. I am now dry and clean and much happier. Dinner is in an hour and I am starving. Didn't work as hard today as maybe I could have, had planned on letting loose today but with the wind, rain and fatigue I was just not feeling it. My room mate got in fifteen minutes before me, I think (he skipped the last rest stop, I did not)

All six days are on my strava
http://app.strava.com/athletes/988745

Full trip report?

Yeah I am super lazy. Maybe I'll get to it today.

I was originally going to write this up somewhere else so that I could post it to multiple places without having to explicitly out the log, but, meh. I can just copy/paste it anyway I guess. Tour du Rouge Trip Report as follows.

Day 0:
My son's elementary school had a 5k race scheduled for this day. Originally I was going to take pictures but they "hired" some people instead. So I agreed to run in it - at the time not realizing it was this same week. I hadn't been running in a few months but it's just a 5k and it's not like I need to win it, so whatever. So I run it, I beat my wife in by 4 or 5 minutes, then we walk back to find the boy, who was walking the whole thing (he also ran a 1k race with the rest of the kids). Coming back in the 2nd time is hilarious because by now it's like 50 minutes into the thing and people are cheering us on, like, "you can do it" and so forth.

After this is all over I go back home, double check all the **** I packed, throw it in the truck and drive to Houston. I get to the hotel that it starts at and they are Not Organized, which I think is a bad sign. There's a ton of people standing around, no one knows where to park their cars and whatever. I actually leave for a while to get some coffee and eat and when I get back everything is going fine, I get my **** and go to the hotel room. That night there's a dinner to kick everything off. I sit at a random table which turns out to be chock full of complete dorks (this was a group of people who came in last literally every day, usually finishing 2+ hours after me. More on this later)

Day 1 (88 miles): Houston to Beaumont
we're going to leave from the hotel we stayed at, and go through Humble which is more or less my home town (I lived there from when I was 9 until I was 18. Most of my immediate family still lives there). It takes kinda forever to get everyone ready and arranged, lined up, safety lecture, speeches and prayers and pictures and what not but finally we ride off. I really thought we were going to take it super easy through humble since we had a police escort, but people took right off, so I did also. I basically rode at 18-20, passing people until I found a group that looked fast enough and fastened onto their rear. I rode with them for about half of the day, lost them at lunch.

We work pretty hard all the way up to lunch, making great time. We're the 2nd group into lunch. The seats are all full so we eat lunch standing up and eventually they clear out so we sit down. I wander around and take some pictures and don't really notice my group leaving. I see them head out and go back to my bike, get on and try to catch them, but it's not happening. So I catch up to someone between me and them and he and I ride in the rest of the way together, doing maybe 16-18, and talking.

Overall, a very nice day. Roads were rough for about 20 miles (we were on highway 90, it's all chipseal, cyclists hate this ****). I pull in, I'm maybe the 10th or 12th person in, I get some food, hang out a bit, then go to the hotel room. I come out later for dinner which is fajitas - fine but not great. I start to wonder if the food is gonna kinda suck. I meet my room mate for the first time and we talk a little. He seems like a reasonably nice guy. Although holy hell he snores. He eventually eitehr quit or I fell asleep, and it never bothered me again the whole week.

Day 2 (92 miles): Beaumont, TX to Sulphur, LA
They have breakfast in the hotel, which is this pretty awesome old hotel in Beaumont. Only problem is that we're in the "tower" which has only 2 elevators and everyone has to take 2 trips to get their bike and bag out. So there are loooong waits to get an elevator.

My room mate wants to ride together and is getting his knee checked out so we get a tiny bit of a late start, like just 60s after everyone else. We catch up to the back and we're riding with the dorks I mentioned on Day 0. They are bugging the crap out of me - they are riding slow, and calling out road hazards constantly for things that just don't even need to be mentioned. Then swerving crazily to miss stuff. It's kinda dumb. So we pass them up and move to somewhere in the back 1/3rd and sort of just cruise. My room mate is having problems with his knee and trying to decide whether he's going to take the SAG truck or not. At the 2nd stop, about 40 miles in, right after we cross into LA, he decides to. Seems like a good idea to me - a day of rest might mean he can ride all the other days, and ****ing it up worse might mean he needs to go home. So I ride the rest of the way by myself. I put the headphones on, I lean over and grind, and I make pretty good time. I hook up with a pace line somewhere in the last 10 miles when it gets into the wind really bad. The road is really terrible too, the whole day was great but the last few miles sucked. We almost get run over when someone makes a right turn across us without signalling.

This time I get in about mid-pack, which is fine. They have free beer which I am still not drinking - tomorrow is 109 miles, I want no impediments towards getting that done. I don't remember what dinner is, but it was fine. I think there may have been bread pudding.

Day 3 (109 miles): Sulfur, LA to Abbeville, LA:
Everyone's a little grumbly about having to do 109 miles today. I'm going to ride with my room mate again. We start out somewhere in the middle, he wants to go pretty slow and honestly starts slowing down a little more as we go on. That goes on until lunch time. After lunch he and I are riding single file, I'm in the front, and basically pulling the whole time which is fine, keeping the pace about where I want it. Suddenly, someone comes from behind and plants themselves in front of me. Apparently we'd picked up a few followers without noticing it and they wanted to get a pace line going. Fine by me, although once you start rotating from the back things kinda fall apart. We eventually try to get a rotate-from-the-front going but it's not really working well. My room mate is either not 100% familiar with how it works, or maybe just thinks he should pull longer than he is, but often he will be in the front, start slowing down, coasting, standing a little, fiddling with his music (oh, yeah, and he wasl istening to music hte whole time which made it really hard to communicate with him). Eventually someone would get tired of it and pass him up and the rest of the line would follow and it would get a little chaotic again for a few miles. But anyway we make reasonable time and I think our avg speed for the day was somewhere between 18 and 18.5

Toward the end we sweep up a few stragglers (it's really common in something like this - riding alone is harder and so you'll pass people and ask if they want to fall in at the back and usually they will, it's better for everyone usually). We hit this ridiculously ****ty road and one of the guys we picked up loses his water bottle - hops right out of the cage. I yell at the guys in front of me and they basically stop in the middle of the road (facepalm.gif). The other guy goes back for the bottle and instead of laying his bike down, is sort of waddling around on it, looking for something. This goes on for like 5 minutes and I am like, wtf did he lose, his bike computer? So one of the guys who is STILL in the middle of the road turns around to go back and check. So now we have him in the middle of the left lane, us in the middle of the right, and Joe in the back going back and forth across the road on his bike. A local in a trailer who is the spitting image of TJ Cloutier comes driving along and yells at us for a few minutes about being dumbasses. I totally agree with him.

Anyway, we get going, with a few more stops for leg cramps and what not. People are complaining about how exhausted they are, I feel great and not even remotely tired.

I drink all the beer I can stand, we have a pretty nice dinner (pasta, pesto, chicken, bread, tres leches)

Day 4 (77 miles): Abbeville to Morgan City
Myself, my room mate and 2 other people that we had ridden with most of the previous day all meet up in the morning and start together. We pretty much stick together all day. Everyone wants to go slow and that's actually OK with me, 77 miles is light compared to the previous days but I have a feeling the accumulated fatigue might make it kind of a problem. So we pretty much just mosey. The first real stop is on Avery Island which is where they make Tobasco, we stop at their plant - they do tours and stuff but none of us are really interested. We have some chile ice cream and get back on the road. Pretty uneventful day. We join up with and disassociate with various larger groups as the day goes on. I have a minor technical issue that I stop to fix, and then later I catch up with the rest of the guys.

We come to another big-ass bridge (there's been one basically every day, this is probably the biggest so far) and I basically say "OK guys I will see you on the other side" and I TAKE OFF. I'm putting out 300-350 watts up to the bridge and then I put out 400+ the whole way up I think. Strava claims I was doing 500+ for a while, maybe. I have to slow down half way up because there are cars blocking the lanes. I get to the other side and I slow down to wait. And I wait, and wait, and eventually one of the guys comes over and says that one of our group had a flat. After like 15 minutes they come down the bridge too - the guy actually had TWO flats, one going up the bridge and one while changing the tire the first time. Very frustrating (for everyone) because we're like literally 2 miles from the end. We roll in, relax, have a few beers.

No memory of what dinner is.

OK that's probably it for today.

Great read, looking forward to the rest. That mileage is absolutely nuts, would love to be able to put together consecutive 80 mile+ days.

In retrospect, I over-specialized in training for length. No one I talked to did anything remotely like the volume I did going up to this thing. I probably would have been just as well off on my regular 7 hour/week program, focusing on speed and power improvements. But whatever, it didn't hurt me either, and I got a taste of what it's like to work 10+ hours/week. Next year I will probably just do my normal training, whatever that is. (And I almost certainly will do it next year)

If I wasn't married with a kid, probably a lot of my vacation would go to stuff like this. As is, it was kind of a big deal for me to take a week of my vacation for myself like this.

Yeah they didn't do the training that you did, but....

I'd rather put the training in and feel great in the event than feel crappy and have to face a 100 mile ride.

I know what you mean about the restrictions on what you can do. I've been looking at all this other stuff though that I wish I had the time and money for, like cycling tours through France, Italy and Spain. Luckily my gf is very supportive and actually seems quite happy about going abroad with me for me to do triathlons in other countries (eg some club members have just done Mallorca half-Ironman and others are currently in Lanzarote for Ironman there).

Sure, but most of them didn't do much of anything. I guess all I mean is that I probably would have benefitted from almost anything with increased saddle time, instead of something specifically based on getting particular distances in. I have no complaints. I managed to get both a little faster and way more comfortable with long distances from jan of this year until now.

I'm trying to remember that I have 30+ years of this left in me, I don't have to do it all this year. 1 or 2 major events a year over a lifetime is a ton of stuff.

I wish I could get my wife into it. Actually I'm going to try to browbeat her into running with me this summer or something (she currently runs and swims). I feel so much automatic camaraderie to people I've suffered alongside, seems a shame to waste it on perfect strangers. I suspect she just doesn't feel the same way about it (i.e. she prefers to suffer alone)

Oh, and speaking of 30+ years... there were plenty of people on the trip in their 50s and 60s - in fact the youngest person was 27 I think and there were not many in their 20s. Mostly I didn't notice, I mean intellectually you know so and so is 62 or whatever, but they seem sort of the same as you. Then, I met all their wives.

I am not trying to say their wives were withered old crones, but just that all these men were incredibly youthful. I am looking forward to that.

Now you are making me sad....

I wish I had started 20 years ago instead of 3. But my daughter is graduating HS this year and I am also planning on doing some bucket list stuff bike wise over the next several years. This year is the HnH 100. Next year I am planning on the Three State Three Mountain Challenge with my brother, who lives in Tennessee. Looking at the 67 mile route on that one, not sure if I could do the whole century with that kind of climbing.

A multi day tour like the one you did is on the list somewhere, just not sure where or when.

I've been thinking of doing the HnH this year also. And I've had my eye on the Triple Bypass for a while but it sounds pretty grueling. I'm doing the Real Ale ride tomorrow in Blanco, I signed up for 85 but I might puss out and do 65, it's going to be hot.

(The 85 mile real ale ride has twice the climbing elevation as my whole week on the tour du rouge!)

Man, last night I really could not sleep at all, every half hour I was waking up. I was having dreams that I was in a cycling race. I'd wake up, look at the clock, and be really confused. Like, where am I, why am I not at the starting line for this race? And so forth. Then I'd fall back asleep and be racing again. Over and over. Today I feel a little sick, hopefully I'm not (back of throat is kinda sore)

Here's rest of trip report.

Day 5 (85 miles): Morgan City to Gonzales
I start the day with the same 3 other guys. As we're lining up, they tell us that our first stop, about 20 miles in, they want us to all wait there for everyone to arrive. The local police are going to give us a motorcycle escort through town. So although I've started with these guys, I tell them I'll probably take off and catch them at the next stop. I stay with them for a few miles and when we get to a bridge, I hammer down. I pass every group except the very front one, which I can see off in the distance. I decide catching them will cost me too much so I just stay where I'm at.

We all hang out at the stop waiting for people to get in. Then we all leave together but get seperated. Myself and one of the guys from the group are riding together at a pretty good clip. I look back and see that a pack has formed behind us and I comment on that to him. We stay at the front of that for about 15 minutes and then I say, man, I'm tired, let's peel off and go to the back. So we do and realize that we've dropped all but 2 people (the ones directly behind us). As we peel off one of them laughs and says "I was afraid you were going to do that)

So we fall back a little more and get on the back of the rest of the group that was behind us, in single file. We're doing that a while and then they start slowing down. The guy at the front doesn't get over. My riding buddy goes to the front to give him a break but that doesn't really work out and so he rides up further and I pass the group to ride with him. We talked to that guy later - he's been sort of leading this group around the whole tour, helping them out. That's nice and all but I feel like he's also kind of robbing them of a chance to learn how a pace line works, etc. When you have a group of 10, rotating the ride leaders doesn't really hurt any individual person that much compared to letting them hang off the back (they spend only 10% or less of their time in the lead) but getting good experience in a pace line is something riders need to do.

Anyway, we ride by ourselves for a while. We pull into the next rest stop. I saw a sign that I thought was funny a quarter mile or so back, so I put my bike down and jog back to it to take a picture (I'll have a link at the end of this to some pics, it's in there). The sign is a picture of a bike with a circle and cross, meaning, "no bikes". I go back to the sign and position myself so I can take pictures of people on bikes passing the sign. (I am not sure where the placer of the sign intended for bikes to go...) I jog back and someone asks me when the swimming part of the triathalon is. THe rest of my group pulls into the stop, we wait a bit for them, and then leave together.

Lunch is that this pretty cool plantation that get go to every year. We take our time at lunch, wander around, take some pictures. There is actually a really scenic photo op down the road a little - I bet a LOT of people have seen pictures of it before. It's like this amazing tree lined road leading up to a plantation mansion. You have to take a 2 mile detour though and I'm not really that interested and neither is anyone else so we just get back on the road. Right after lunch we get to a place where you can see the big ass bridge we're going to have go up, crossing the mississippi. It's the biggest one on the tour. It's not super steep (6% grade I think) but it goes on a pretty long way, and it has these massive expansion joint fingers that are hell on tires. Last year out of 50 riders, 20 got flats going over it.

As we're getting closer to the bridge I tell the guy in front of me that I'm going to stop at some point and try to get a picture of it, and then catch up with them. He nods OK. I never find a really optimal spot (there are lots of trees and a levy blocking the view) but I find an OK place, take a few pics (see pics at end) and then race to catch up. I'm working so hard I miss the turn. Fortunatly I realize it pretty quickly - I remember from the map that the bridge is to the "left" but you go under the bridge and make 3 right turns to get to it. After I go under the bridge, I see no turn and keep going. After like a half mile I realize this can't be right because the bridge is behind me. I see someone coming the other way and realize I'm not the only one who make this mistake. We turn around and go back, looking for signs. The sign for the turn is there but it was sort of folded and blown by the wind, where it's hard to see. So I am now even farther behind and I BLAST up this bridge as hard as I can, pedal hard down it, and then keep going as hard as I can. I can see my guys ahead of me at a turn, and I start hoping they'll get caught at a red light, but they don't. I don't either though and I catch them a few minutes later.

Rest of the ride is pretty uneventful except that I get a flat tire. We stop, I get it changed, I am putting the wheel back onto the bike when the mechanics pull up and ask if I need help. Figures.

Dinner is ribeyes, mashed potatos, green beans and again lots of beer. I down it all and then like an hour later my room mate says, let's go to the bar, they have this amazing crawfish thing. So we go, and they do, it's this crawfish 7 ways thing. We both get one, it's a ton of food, but I eat it no problem. We have some drinks and some other guys come in and we all hang out. I am really not a social person but I enjoyed it. It helps that we all have a huge overriding common interest (bikes/biking)

Day 6 (83 miles): Gonzales to New Orleans
The forecast was for rain in the early morning, continuing somewhat through the day. The thunder is so loud it wakes everyone up around 5am and it is POURING. The weather channel looks super grim. The ride people announce at breakfast that they're pushing the start time back a half hour, and that anyone who doesn't want to ride can get bussed to the end. I decide to wait and see what the majority does. The majority wants to ride, so I opt to also (I think in the end maybe 75% rode, although some of those gave up after a rest stop or two)

By the time we start it's only drizzling, but the roads are wet. We ride in a pretty big group, mostly double-paceline where we can, otherwise single. It's not bad except that some people just suck at being in a paceline. The biggest offender is a guy behind me, who basically pedals too hard constantly, and then coasts, basically "accordioning" the line - half the time he is coasting next to me and then the other half he is dropping back. This **** annoys me so much. Also occaisonally he spits to one side, which is really terrible manners in a pace line (so often that spit is going right into someone face or leg or something). When the line breaks a little I let him over take me.

At the first rest stop it starts raining again. They hold us there 10m or so until the worst is over and then we set off. It doesn't rain hard or long. I'm on my own, though, and I get a flat right away. The mechanic truck comes by about the time I get the wheel off, changes it for me, and gives me an extra tire just in case. (When it rains you will get flats much much easier, I think there were more than 50 "official" flats that day (i.e. ones the mechanics fixed). I rode a while with a guy who had 4 flats. I had one more later in the day that I fixed myself. All of these are legit blowouts - a piece of glass or something that insta-pierces the tube, a huge whooshing sound and you're instantly flat.

I saw people get flats, some of them were really funny. There was a guy at the side of the road, a person in front of me slows down to help him, as he's stopping, HE gets a big blowout flat also. I ask if they need anything, they're both OK, so I go on. I ride by myself for maybe 15 miles, it sucks bad. There's a headwind, the road is rough, everything is wet and muddy. I have a rain jacket on but my shorts are soaked, so it's like wearing a wet diaper. I eventually catch up to a group (or maybe they caught me? I don't remember). I fall in and we pick up speed and that's pretty good. I ride with different groups on and off all day.

After a while we get to the levy. These are a pretty cool place to ride, they're maybe 30 feet tall, basically imagine something that looks like a speed bump, but 30 feet tall and many miles long. Along the length at the top there's a nice asphalt track. You can see the river, you can see all the houses and stuff on the other side, it's nice. No traffic, no stop signs, so we roll pretty fast. We come up to the 2nd to last stop, my group doesn't want to stop, but I do (somehow they thought it was 12 more miles, I knew it was 20 more). I stop for just a few minutes then get back on. I eventually pass that group when they have to stop for some flats. In fact, all the groups are just leapfrogging each other the whole last 20-30 miles because of flats.

I'm riding on the levy by myself, catch up to a guy, decide to slow a little bit and ride with him. Weather has cleared up, no sun but at least no rain. We're just crusing at 16 mph talking, and then I say "hmm, it's kinda... starting to get dark" and he agrees and we look back and see a rain front coming in. We feel a few drops and start to BOOK IT hoping to get in before we get too wet. But nope, it really starts to rain hard. We actually have no idea how much longer we have, because there are no signs for the tour posted on the levy. We actually get to a point where we think we might have missed the exit, because the rest stop is supposed to be at mile 77 and we're already at mile 80. We ask some guys in a truck if they've seen other people on bikes, and if they know how to get where we're going. They have and they do, they give us some landmarks to look out for and we keep going. Turns out the route had been changed from what was on our maps, due to construction.

We ride through a part of new orleans and then get to Audoban park, where the lunch stop is (lunch was at alllllmost the very end, kind of annoying). The park trolls the **** out of us. Like we approach the entrance and we see people ringing cowbells and think "all right, we've arrived!". Nope! We ride a few miles through the park and see more people with cowbells. OK, NOW we've arrived. NOPE. A few miles more and we see all the tents and stuff, and we're there.

Lunch is this really great etouffe, they have coffee, there are tents to get under (it's rained continuously on us for like an hour at this point). People are huddled around in blankets. They announce that we're skipping the last part (which is sort of like a coordinated parade through new orleans because a) who the hell is going to watch it and b) traffic is freakin awful, it's raining and getting worse

So random volunteers are bringing their cars around to drive us to the hotels. As a cyclist I love my bike and I almost never want to leave it somewhere unguarded but they instruct us to dump our bikes on the grass and they'll get them back to Houston for us and basically no one bats and eye, we just toss our bikes on the ground, no one giving a **** if we ever see a bike again.


And that's pretty much it. I go to the hotel, take a hot shower, then a bath (which turns black even after the shower) and then another bath. We have the closing dinner which is fun and then I go to sleep. I walk around new orleans in the morning, get some beignets and coffee and cafe du monde, then pack my **** and get on the bus back to houston. We leave NO at like 10am, I finally am back in austin around 8pm, kind of a long day.

I took a few pictures, some of them are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/6519815...7633465964961/

The tour people took a lot more, they'll be sending us CDs of them soon. They have some on their FB page too, though: https://www.facebook.com/TourduRouge?ref=br_tf