Photos By: Mike Martin

We’ve had some questions about our daily routine on this little road trip. Of course, every day is different but here’s what a typical schedule might look like.

Photo by Josh Kadis

We usually meet in the hotel lobby at 7am and head out to breakfast at Denny’s, IHOP, or something like that. A couple of the hotels have had edible breakfast in-house, which has been rad. By the time we eat, fiddle with our bikes, load up the vehicles, and drive to wherever we’re starting from, it’s usually between 9am and 9:30.

We have a great setup in terms of vehicles and support. The riders and photo/video equipment are transported in a rental passenger van, while the bikes and luggage roll in a biodiesel Dodge Sprinter provided by Clif Bar with a trailer. A lot of the taping happens from a Honda PS250 scooter, which travels inside the trailer as well.

Photo by Josh Kadis

Mike Martin is shooting video and photos, along with Gabe Morford for the first few days. They’re the two filmmakers behind MASH. Will Meeker plays the role of production assistant and gets a litany of little things done. Steve MacDonald has been driving the passenger van and making sure that all the riders have what we need during the day.
Matt Sharkey from Clif Bar has been with us the whole time, driving the Sprinter and helping us in innumerable ways. All the support has been awesome. It’s what makes this trip possible, really.

Photo by Mike Martin

The riders, by the way, are Rainier Schaeffer, Jonathan Burkett, Garrett Chow, Blake Van Knopka ,Walton Brush, Andy Peterson for the first couple days, and myself, although I won’t be riding all the stages due to some other commitments at the Tour.

Anyways, once we hit the road it’s pretty free-form. Sometimes we ride in a paceline and sometimes the group breaks up, it depends on the terrain and how people are feeling. We eat a lot of Clif product, supplemented by “real food” like ham and cheese sandwiches. I’ve been drinking 6-8 bottles per day.

Photo by Josh Kadis

The pro peloton usually passes us during the ride. It’s kind of amazing how many cars are required to shepherd them. There’s a “rolling enclosure” around the race, meaning that CHP officers shut everything down before the race comes through, then the roads open back up. We just have to wait. If there’s a breakaway with a big lead on the main field, it can take well over half an hour.

A few of the pro riders know what we’re up to, especially the Garmin-Slipstream team since we did an event with them at Clif Bar HQ in Berkeley last week. Svein Tuft always gives a head-nod. And it’s been surprising how many spectators know MASH. A lot of people have seen us out there every day and cheer when we come by.

Photo by Josh Kadis

We’re treating this as a road trip, not an official race. So we just ride as far and as fast as we can until we get as close as we can to where the race finished that day. Our arrival time has varied, but it’s usually dark by the time we climb off our bikes, mill around for a minute, put on dry clothes, and load up the vehicles. We’ll grab some dinner on the way to the hotel, and then get some rest.

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Josh

Photo by Mike Martin

Slow going on Wednesday’s stage. We rolled around 9:15 and reached the top of the final climb at maybe 5pm, having covered just 70 miles. At that point, the consensus was to pack it in for the day. We were still 45 miles from the finish.

A few of the delays:

• Cleat broken while skidding – 20 minutes
• Waiting for the race entourage to pass through – 40 minutes
• Many, many gear changes – 20 minutes

We started off under clear skies on gently rolling roads through the orchards outside Merced with the mountains on the horizon. But after the course left the valley floor, we didn’t cross a mile of flat ground the rest of the day and there wasn’t a climb or descent too small to warrant changing gears. I switched between 44×21 and 44×17, but I probably should have replaced the 17 with a 15. Oh well.

Photo by Mike Martin

That said, there was some amazing riding over snow-covered passes that had to be plowed earlier in the day because of the Tour. Mike got some gnarly descending shots from the scooter.

At least we knocked off all the day’s difficulties; from where we stopped, it was all downhill to the finish. I guess that riding track bikes during the Tour is an inherently slow method to cover these courses. Sure, It was disappointing not to complete the stage but that’s part of the adventure. Not every day is going to work out perfectly.

But one can always hope.

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Josh

Photo by Mike Martin

Other than the weather, gearing is probably our most frequent topic of conversation. These courses are throwing a really wide range of terrain at us; finding the perfect setup will be essential to make it all the way through the trip. But most of the roads are completely unknown to us and you can only learn so much from the course profile, so there’s a lot of guesswork involved.

Tuesday’s 100-mile stage* from San Jose to Modesto started with the super steep Sierra Road climb right off the bat, followed by some gradual descending, a smaller climb over Patterson Pass, another gradual descent, and then about 50 miles of pancake flat, windy roads through the Central Valley.

Our gear selections:

• Garrett: 44×20 and 44×15
• Blake: 44×22 and 44×14
• Walton: 47×19 and 47×17
• Josh: 44×21, 44×17, and 44×15
• Rainier: 46×21 and 46×17

Sierra Road is so steep that Cervélo TestTeam (including last year’s Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre) told me they were going down to a 38t chainring. So all of us would have been more comfortable on a smaller gear, but we managed. I can only speak for myself but if that climb had been at the end of the stage, I would have really struggled.

For the rest of the stage, the 44×17 was perfect on Patterson Pass and the 44×15 was good for the flats. I was maybe a little overgeared for some of the block headwind sections.

Wednesday’s stage has probably more total elevation gain than today but the climbs are more gradual. Sierra Road is roughly a 2,000 foot ascent in three miles, and the first climb tomorrow is about the same elevation gain but over maybe ten miles. I’m thinking that the 44×17 should be okay as my climbing gear, and I might run a 44×14 on the flop-side since there will be some long, wide-open descents. But it’s all a crapshoot, really.

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Josh

* We had to skip about 20 miles in the middle in order to get ahead of the race’s rolling road closures. So it was more like an 80 mile day for us.

Photos by Mike Martin