They wisely do the start in stages so that 2200 people aren't all turned loose at once. Since the first 7 - 10 miles are on a fairly narrow section they had coned off for us and the road surface is a bit rough this was a good idea. Throw in some rail road tracks and it would have been a disaster any other way. I was in the second wave.

I got to the first rest stop, which turned out wasn/t the first stop but the last and used the porto potty again. I saw I missed 2 calls from my father in law. I knew that wasn't good, but I couldn't find him or Connie. The next 10 miles to the first rest stop was mostly suburban retail area with some rollers, but nothing significant. But a good area for the ride to get spread out some.

I finally found Connie at this stop and found her mom was in the hospital. She encouraged me to keep doing the long ride, as this was where the long and short ride seperated. I was worried she would need to fly to Florida and I wouldn't be much help to her, not that I could since she is in NY and I am in CA. If I had known then that I was going to lose cell service for the next 3 hours or more I might have made a different decision, but as it turned out everthing worked out ok and I didn't miss anything.

We went out further towards the mountains and about 35 miles in we hit the start of the King/Queen of the Mountain Time Trial. This is a 10K of nothing but up. It starts out at about 4.5% grade and gradually, and sometime not so gradually, builds to a 6.5% avg grade the last couple of miles. It seemed to take me forever, and I wouldnt be surprised if my time for it was well over an hour. So far I haven't found anywhere to get that info, so it may remain a mystery. ETA: They did post the results on line and although it seemed like more than an hour, I came in at exactly 54 minutes. This ranked me 660 out of 909. I guess I have some work to do! I saw several walkers, so I at least did better than them. There were people coming down the hill so I figured there was a turn around at the top and I would have the downhill to look forward to. Turns out these folks had bailed on the climb and were heading home. Once at the top it continued on through the mountains.

We climbed and decended over the next 20 or so miles, when we finally hit a down hill that went on for a good 15 miles into a canyon and back towards San Diego.

I never stopped at the aid stations again as the lines for food and drink were quite long and I was running late for a meeting I had later in the day. I had almost enough on me with the infinit and water bottles. But I finally did run out about 80 miles in. But rather than wait, I just stopped at a convenience store near the RV park. Worked out well and didn't miss much time at all.

Finally back in civilization and flatter roads, and now a head wind. Probably wouldn't have been bad, but the hills took a lot out of me. The last 5 miles of rough road didn't help either.

All in all, a very enjoyable day on the bike. Definately a challenging course, and not something to do without a pretty good base of seat time.

Continue to build my bike conditioning and ride more hills. Having less of me to haul up the hills would probably be advantages as well.

Didn't have a lot of time to hang out after as I was supposed to meet someone to ship a car home (turns out he was stuck in traffic so I could have stayed longer). It looked like they put on a pretty good feast.