California Coast ride
Hi team,
I did the California coast ride from San Francisco to Santa Barbara last weekend and I wanted to share my experience with you. It’s a bucket list ride for a lot of people but I’m quick lucky to do it multiple times since it’s in my back yard. The coast ride this year AKA “The Coast Ride 2018 - Nacimiento Edition” was epic!!! I have done this ride before but this year was a little different since we had to take a slight detour due to the huge mudslide that washed away a one mile section of Highway 1. This added a big climb on day 2. Overall it was a 3 day ride with 2300 feet of climbing. We had clear sunny sky every day with a temperature of 55-65 every day. I couldn’t ask for more because when I’ve done ride in the spring we’ve got rained on. So we got extremely lucky with the weather but I was also mentally prepared to do it rain or shine.
This year was my first year doing the ride organized by the group https://www.thecoastride.org/ . Typically I do it with a group of friends of 12-15 people and we have some of the spouses/gf/bf driving a large minibus/van for SAG. The ride this year was a completely different experience. There were about 250 riders from all over the world. I signed up for this with six other friends/triathletes from my weekly Saturday ride group. The cost of this ride, a mere $100 bucks. Daily hotel around this time of year costs around $100/night and you have to add in one way rental car back to San Francisco which most people share. But you should also only expect what you get for $100 for an event like this which is moving your bag from start to finish every day. You also get to make your own sandwich for lunch and a pizza at the finish. Finish a little later than 8hrs on that day and the pizza may be all gone. SAG support is somewhat limited and is there just for emergency/mechanical although we did see them make random unannounced stops for water along the road. You have to figure out your own logistics on where you have to stop to refill on water in between the lunch stop and also in between finish unless you are moving with a group which has done this ride before. With the cost being just $100, this also brought in a lot more young, skinny, shaved, dressed up clones riders. MAMILS like me were the minority. There were also private tours piggy backing the same ride as well, and there were a few loved ones doing personal sagging. But majority were plain $100 payers (but with kits and bikes that cost as much as cars!).
The ride it’s self was definitely roadie style and we were just hanging on to large pelotons for the most part every day. If we got dropped by one fast group all we had to do was to hop on the next group and hang on. It’s amazing how much draft you get when you move in a large peloton. For us, we were doing just fine hanging on to these groups on the flats but we would struggle to keep up with them on the climbs. I think this is were I could clearly see who was a roadie and who was a triathlete. It was quite an experience riding on large groups day after day and felt like you were in a stage race. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were a lot more triathletes than I expected at the end of each day. Even though people from all over the world came over, not everyone will finished all 3 days. Some folks came to ride just on day1 while a few had to call it quits on day 2.
Overall it’s great experience and I would highly recommend this ride to all riders. The catch however is that the ride is usually held on MLK weekend every year in January. This is the rainy season for the California coast and there is a good chance that you may be rained-on on some or all three days.
Here is the links on Strava for the ride.
https://www.strava.com/activities/1355778557
https://www.strava.com/activities/1357886290
https://www.strava.com/activities/1359270912
I have limited pictures since we were barely hanging on the large groups to get a draft.
Comments
Those are great pictures of you in the EN Kit...we'll be sure to save them.
Enjoy some rest and then it's time to focus on the rest of your year!!!
~ Coach P