I spent last night clutching a Chipotle burrito in bed, trying to stuff it down my throat before I passed out. I’ve been pretty wiped out on rides before (a couple of weeks ago comes to mind), but 9000 feet of climbing in 126 miles ruined me.

I guess they call it “Issaquah Alps” for a reason. Every single steep pitch on the eastside was marked for two wheeled consumption. I came in strong and left a shaky, broken mess.

We started in Redmond, using one of my “free” days at work to take advantage of a weekday ride. A stroll down Lake Sammamish brought us to the first rise up SE 34th and really set the tone for the day.

The air was crisp and it was tough to regulate my temperature. Every time we climbed, I would overheat, and every descent brought back freezing air. Believe me when I say that this ride is nothing but up and down. We had maybe 5 miles without some sort of grade.

We looped some familiar roads before reaching the biggest surprise hill of the day (for me at least), Somerset Blvd. SE. It was a long climb up through an active neighborhood. Parents were in the process of dropping their kids off at school. Apparently they are all in band too, since almost everyone had an instrument.

I seem to have some sort of tick in my dynamo hub so it clicked like a metronome all day. “It will keep us honest”, I told Chris, noting that it gave us a pretty good indication of our speed. We took Newport Way eastbound and started the Zoo Hill (Cougar Mountain) climb. It was beautiful as usual, and pretty punishing.

The route is really fun, but the downside to an urban ride like this is the sheer volume of controls needed. There were 3 pages of informational controls that we had to keep track of throughout the day. The paperwork was a little too intense. The cue sheet suffered from a little TMI syndrome as well. I was constantly confused by roads that were marked as “Right” or “Left” when they should have just been “Becomes” or “Stay on”. I’m guessing it could have been half the size it ended up being (a whopping 5 pages). Long story short, Chris and I spent a lot of time fiddling with papers in between grinding up hills.

We got down as far south as the Green River Valley before pushing up 218th and eventually towards Tiger Mountain. We stopped in Issaquah and tried to find coffee. It was a bit off course, but we both really wanted to sit for a bit and rest. The ONLY coffee shop in town (or so it seemed) was an awful little place that we went to on our night time brevet from last year. It feels like a coffee house from the 90′s. You expect the baristas to have Dr. Seuss hats on and a beat poet in the corner. Then, I experience the worst Americano ever. I am pretty flexible with food quality on these things, but even in my delirious state, I could tell that this coffee was crap. The guy making it pulled a shot and drowned it in like 24oz of water. I’m getting sick just thinking about it. Somehow the other barista managed to drop some spare change in Chris’ coffee after that. I better have a damn good reason if I ever set foot in that place again.

We took a few more tough climbs in here, but Lake Alice Road on Snoqualmie Ridge took the cake for the day. The grade maxed out at 24% and never seemed to drop below 15 or so for a really long climb. Somehow Chris was standing on his middle cog until about the halfway point when he realized that he still has lower gears. Ouch. I held on to my granny for quite a ways until I stopped for a second near the top. Walking felt way more comfortable at that point.

We had two controls less than 3 miles from each other after that in Snoqualmie. The descent down highway 203 was a nice change of pace but my legs were really starting to feel the day’s effort. Tolt Hill Rd. was ahead of us. (Funny how SIR finds every road with “hill” in the name and sticks them on the route.)

I crawled up Tolt Hill. It sure seemed longer than I remember.

We took a right on to Highway 202. Then, the final kick in the balls. If we were to stay on this flat road, we would be riding directly to the finish. Instead, the cue pushed us up and down another hill for an info control. Then we had to backtrack (!!!) up the hill again to turn off on to a side road with more rolling hills. I paced along in a crazy stupor. I could tell Chris was tired too, but he was definitely waiting for me at points. At points I was actually thinking how awesome the situation was. My body had hit bottom, and for some reason that felt like an achievement. I think they make pills for that.

We rolled in to the finish at Whole Foods at exactly the “average” time posted on the SIR website, eleven hours and twenty five minutes.