A little background:
So, if you’ve been following along with my blog or at a minimum my Tour de Cure Colorado updates, you know that I made a promise to Molly back in March to ride with her in the 20k ride. You may also know that I did the 100k ride before I got back to ride with Molly in the 20k. If you didn’t know all that, hopefully you’re caught up now 
So, I finish the 100k ride, which I cut dangerously close and almost didn’t make it back in time to start the 20k ride. But with the thought of Molly in my head, I make it back, even though I had a rough patch on my longer ride. I get back, go say hi to Grams, who tells me I better get in line because they’re getting ready to go. I say hi to Sue Glass (who, i can’t remember what her position is with the Colorado ADA, but she’s important) and then I got get in line. Now, I didn’t ever find Molly in this line and I was bummed. There were so many people and I don’t know what I was thinking, thinking that I’d recognize her in her helmet. But I looked anyways.
ready to go again for round 2, ding ding, blood sugar of 157
The Ride:
Now, I’ve never been on the shortest of the rides in all the Tour de Cures I’ve done (8 up to this point) so this was a new experience for me. Talk about traffic jam, once we got going, it was difficult to not run over little kids, or adults pulling little kids, it was a struggle for me. So, once we left the fairgrounds, and got across the street to the park where we’d be riding, I pulled off to the side and let everyone. EVERYONE! pass me, for 2 reasons.
1) I still hadn’t found Molly
2) It was too frustrating for me to be in the pack of slow people
When everyone had passed me, I still hadn’t seen Molly. But I figured she could still be out there so I was going to ride this ride. And I got out there, and I rode, pedaling once every 10 minutes (at least that’s what it felt like) I had to stay unclipped so that I didn’t fall over, because traveling at 3 miles an hour on a flat, I was sure I was going to fall over.
I went traveling with the pack all the way past the photographer, where, as luck would have it, some lady decided she was going to speed past me, and all the slow people in front of me, so I had to go for a second shot with the photographer because I didn’t pass the photographers on the other routes because I had gone out early.
But, she did get a good picture of me on the second pass (she commented that I looked too happy, and all I could think was, what, should I look mad, crazed, what??? Happy fit, what can I say).
Now, because I went for the second loop I got separated from the extremely slow pack, and as I was riding along, I passed Molly. I was so excited. And she remembered me, that was even more exciting. I went along with her for 6 miles and she chatted my ear off. I heard about everything from how excited she was to be back in school, to how gymnastics is her favorite sport, to how her cousins were riding as well. It was great.
When we got to the half way point, I was not well, this is where all the gatorade from the 100k (my first mistake) caught up with me. My stomach was cramping bad, and I knew it was the gatorade because none of my usual stuff does that to me. So I checked my blood, it was 70. I treated it. I talked with Molly’s dad a bit about cycling and what it does to my blood sugars. And then, after almost crawling to the restroom, I decided I needed to hurry back to the start.
I got lost, because I missed a sign, that didn’t exist (while the path to the half way point was well marked, the return path wasn’t, and so if you weren’t looking for the original “hey go this way” arrows, you’d easily get lost), but when I got to the road, I knew I was lost because Tami had told us that if we found the road, we had gone the wrong way at the very beginning. So I turned around and found the right way. I caught up with Molly again and rode with her for a bit longer, but then eventually my stomach started cramping again so I told her I’d see her at the end and I sped back to the finish going 16mph.
About 40 minutes after I made it to the finish, Molly made it back and we got this picture:
Let me tell you, it was worth fighting the fight with the first 100k for me to get back and ride with Molly.
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