Assault on Marion – Recap

So this was supposed to be a recap of the Assault on Mount Mitchell. A few things conspired against us which I will explain later. We managed to get to the Spartanburg Auditorium at 6:10 AM. There were a lot of riders there but for some reason it just didn’t look as crowded as last year. When the ride got underway at 6:30 AM it was already warm and the group took off rather slowly.

At the start we managed to see two other tandems, one of which, a Maryland couple were going all the way up to the summit. That is quite a feat for a tandem, no matter how strong a pair you are. The other tandem couple we spoke to on the road had rented the tandem they were riding on to do this ride.

Now the next part just illustrates how are day went. During the first five miles Nicole commented on how many people had some sort of mechanical difficulty, mostly flat tires. She started counting them, then guess what, at mile 6 we had a flat. Being that I had used my spare tube just the night before, I had to patch this on. I found the hole and the very small sliver of rock that was in the tire and placed patches both on the tube and inside the tire. I wasn’t going to take any chances. Unfortunately this put us literally at the back of the entire pack of riders. So we had to play catch up.

Our strategy for the ride was go easy to the first rest stop to warm up. We made sure to only stop long enough to refill the bottles and then get back under way. But with the flat earlier we did push a little harder to make up some of the lost time. We managed to pass quite a few riders and then once the sun rose over the trees it started to get hot.

When I say it got hot, it was fry and egg on the pavement kind of hot! It was August kind of hot! It was Halle Berry kind of hot (sorry my mind wandered). The other issue that not too many people mentioned is that it was also pretty windy with the majority of it being a headwind as the day heated up. It seemed that every climb was in the sun. Plus on the way to the next rest stop we had to wait on some road construction that delayed us between 10-15 minutes.

We got to the first rest stop in pretty good shape, drank water and Heed, then off to the next stop. That one was harder. The heat and the wind was starting to take its toll on us and we hadn’t even gotten to Bill’s Hill yet. Our overall pace slowed.

Bill’s Hill actually wasn’t that bad for us. We found a rhythm and stuck to it and managed a respectable 8 mph plus up the entire climb. But Bill’s Hill is the start of the real climbing to Marion. Even if the hills are a little shorter, they are steeper.

As we approached the last stop before Marion I told Nicole I didn’t want to go on. We were on another climb and I had developed a saddle sore right where the gel and foam transition in my saddle. That is one of several reasons I will never own another gel saddle again. I was suffering gastric distress from drinking too much Heed. Since it was so hot I wanted to make sure that I stayed hydrated so the only way was to keep drinking even though it hurt to do so. Nicole reminded me that we were only a mile or too from the last rest stop. After a very short rest on the side of the road we journeyed on.

At that rest stop I ran into Karen, a rider that I had meet on a ride over the Blue Ridge Parkway last year. We drank some more plain water this time and we also had some poured over our heads, to try to cool down our body temperatures some. We managed to get back on the bike and continue. After each climb I would tell Karen and Nicole that we were almost there, “it’s just over this hill and around the next turn”, I would say. They quickly figured out I was lying. We did pick up the pace some on the last 10 miles but it was a slow day in the saddle.

On thing I can say, I am so proud of Nicole. She worked very hard not only pedaling but keeping me motivated to finish when I wanted to give up. There were a few climbs where our legs felt like rubber but we managed to keep going. Any tandem captain would be glad to have her as a stoker.

A few observations; I underestimated what a month off the bike while I recovered from heart surgery would do to my training. I underestimated just how much climbing and how hard it would be on the tandem. I underestimated the effect of the heat on our performance. Overall Nicole and I finished Marion about 45 minutes slower than I had done it last year. There was simply no way to go on with this ride up to Mitchell.

I was not the only one to abandon at Marion. As I looked over the cars park at the campground I noticed quite a few bikes already on the carriers with yellow Mitchell numbers. As I spoke to a few fellow Charlotteans I found out that they had decided to stop at Marion also. I also didn’t feel too bad as this was Nicole and my longest tandem ride to date, and certainly the ride with the most climbing. We finished it and didn’t finish too badly either. Besides I already check the Assault off my “bucket list” last year.

Nicole and I won’t be headed back to the Assault any time in the near future. It just takes too much time to prepare this old body for the ride. It also comes just a little too soon at the beginning of June. We are going to concentrate on flatter rides and we are going to start to look for a good and flat Century as this is our only real goal left for us.

The following chart shows our stats for the ride. The splits are each of the rest stops along the way.