La Montaña del Diablo

The Team gears up for the ascent.

I learned something important today. It's really hard to do a "biggest ever" personal record if you aren't rested up. Did I rest up yesterday? No, I rode the Cinderella. So what did I have to go and do today?

Mt. Diablo.

Mt. Diablo is one of those peaks you can see from nearly all over the San Francisco Bay Area on a clear day. Because it's big. How big? About 4,000 feet of big.

I've never tried climbing this hill before. I've never even been up it in a car. But today was a Team day, so the whole Death Ride team was out, practicing our climbing skills. Our route included Mt. Diablo along with Morgan Territory. Our total ride on the day was about 70 miles, and about 7000' of climbing overall.

And I started it tired.

Mt. Diablo, center rear. It's the big one.

I never could catch the ghost rider.

What a difference a day makes, though! Just yesterday was Cinderella, all rain, all wind. Not today! It was  gorgeous blue skies all the way!

One thing that surprised me - the climb up Diablo isn't too terrible. I stopped to help a guy with a blown tire, then slowly ground my way up, taking nifty pictures as I went.

The higher I got, the colder it became. It was fun to see trees covered in ice, shedding it in sheets as they warmed in the morning Sun. The American radio tower dropped a big sheet just as I was riding by, nearly spooking me right off the bike!

That's ICE!

Right at the top of the whole climb, somebody decided it'd be fun to add an insult-to-injury pitch to the final parking lot. I can just see the engineers chuckling to themselves, "let's put the visitor center on TOP of the HIGHEST rock and then we'll carve steps for them to climb!" "Nah, that'd be cruel. Let's pave the steps and let cars go up." "Aw, okay, but let's make sure it feels like they're going up a roller coaster!" "Yeah, people LOVE roller coasters! Especially the first hill! Let's do THAT!"

So I got to climb this roller-coaster grade from Hell, which I suppose is appropriate given that it's Mt. Diablo and all. To my credit, I actually made it as far as seeing the sign that said "summit" before jamming my bike sideways into the rock-face (no cliff for me, tyvm), clipping out, staggering over and then NOT puking. Oh yeah, breakfast wanted out. But I kept it down! Yay! Max heart rate for the win...

Lots of ice on the tree. Not so much puke.

The last hundred feet was a nice little walk and I was there! Okay, Mt. Diablo, maybe you win this round. But I'll getcha next time.

It was some consolation that all the other riders in my group gasped like flopping fish at the top of the hill, too. Some bailed, some finished before collapsing. Misery loves company.

Of course, one of the things about Team rides is nobody gets left behind, and we do the miles. So we gathered at the top before starting a screaming descent. I love descents. The whole point of climbing hills like this is to come down as fast as you possibly can!

And so I did! Down the mountain, out to the north and onward to the rest of the loop around the base of the whole thing. The team had to get in a full set of climbing miles, after all. We strive to climb 100 feet for every horizontal mile travelled.

So next up came a fun little climb up into the Morgan Territory Preserve. The path up to the Preserve is a sheep-track of a road, last paved in the 1960's as an experiment to see what happens when you give hallucinogenic drugs to construction workers with heavy equipment. It's the reason you see those "do not operate heavy machinery while taking this" warnings on pharmacy bottles. 

Look, ma! I'm on top of a mountain!

By this point, I was pretty done in. The climb felt like it would never end. I passed from tired to exhausted to woozy, then passed through to the undiscovered country beyond. My legs burned then entered into some other dimension where pain is just something beautiful, like water burbling down a hill. At one point I think I was passed by a few dozen chittering monkeys on mopeds, fez-caps held high. One of them waved at me and said something, might've been a warning, but sadly I only know a few words in Macaque.

I barely remember any of that climb. I had held up pretty well through Mt. Diablo, but the after-effects of riding the Cinderella were catching up to me. Parts of my body that had been threatening to secede had simply given up complaining, energy just couldn't be mustered.

The descent down the Preserve was beautiful: fast, brilliant and wide-open. I was conducting the choral of Beethoven's 9th, the multitude of angelic voices pouring across me from the heavens, cascading down the valley floor. How easy it would've been to simply steer into the light of that descent...but somehow my bike kept to the road, not the sky, all the way to the long rollout at the bottom.

My bike needed a rest.

At last, the home stretch. A bracing headwind. A narrow tunnel of "just finish", no room for any other thoughts. I found another Team member, grabbed their wheel, and just kept them in focus.

To their credit, they never let me fall behind.

In the end, we rolled back to the cars, many hours later. I couldn't quite figure out where the hysterical laughter was coming from amidst all the cheers and screams of relief from my companions...then I realized it was me. What the heck was I thinking? I can't believe I did this all to myself in one weekend. Smart? Not even close. But amazing all the same.

So today's lesson: Rest before you ride.

And my takeaway? I need to get a lot stronger.

I'm looking forward to doing this again.