"What I hadn't realized at the time was that I had lucked into one of the most unique cycling events in California."
by Stuart Barrington / primalblends Ambassador
I first came across the Rock Cobbler at the end of 2015. I was looking for some early in the season beat up races to get me ready for my A race; Dirty Kanza 200. IT was a local race and it was described as stupidly hard. This seemed like a great event to cut my teeth on for the year and it would be my first ever "gravel" event. What I hadn't realized at the time was that I had lucked into one of the most unique cycling events in California. I feel very fortunate to have gotten in relatively close to the ground floor, this past weekend I completed the 4.0 version, so now I can say I have ridden 50% of them! It's something that's going to be on the calendar for years to come. You can read about 2015's madness here.
So with 2017 being having a distinct gravel emphasis it was without pause that I signed up for this year's race. I had in mind that I "kinda" knew what to expect but each year the course changes and this year would have the added challenges created as a result of California actually having a winter. We have gone from a state suffering from 5 years of drought to one with more water than we know what to do with!
Additionally, this year Becca would be trying her hand at the event too, you can read her report here. We had agreed ahead of time to ride our own race, this took the pressure off both of us. Of course, we still both spent many miles thinking about what was happening to each other.
So with all that said on with the race report. The route had been released about 10 days earlier and as expected it had its fair share of up and downs. 85 miles-ish with 8000i-ish' of gain was on the docket, this excluded the 4 mile roll back to Lengthwise Brewery which was actually the starting point. I was also planning on making this my fourth UCMA ride and would need to add a few extra miles to round up to over the 90 mark which is the minimum distance that they will consider for qualification.
Read the rest of the story on Stuart's blog: www.quadrathon.blogspot.com »
