By the time we reached Las Vegas, we had already figured out that we should probably learn something about bikes and biking. So I went into barnes & noble and bought a couple of books. I opened one book to a random page, a chart - The 10 Top Beginner Touring Mistakes. You can not accuse us of either ‘not shifting enough or ‘taking too dressy clothes’, but we hit on the others, 8 out of 10.
The reaction of the first 14 bike people we came across to our selection of bikes was anywhere from laughter to incredulity. 'Too aggressive," they said, or simply, "You can't ride cross country on a mountain bike." The 15th was Fred the bike magician from Zion, he said our bikes were Ok. We stopped asking after that. Fred is the man.
On the 10th day we learned how to blow up the tires on two of our bikes. (fyi - you must unscrew the tops of those little stems before inflating. The larger stems, the ones on the tires we'd ridden as kids, required no specialized information)
On the 11th day we discovered drafting. For those that don't know, this is where you put the front tire of bike 2 within 6 to 12 inches of the back tire of bike 1.
I liked this a lot, because the back guy (me, as much as possible) didn't have to peddle so hard. I figured this was our magic bullet and we'd be going all the way to DC like this. On the 3rd day of drafting, I noticed that Kevin wasn't so enthusiastic about it. We were traveling I-40 in Arizona and when I asked him about it, he wondered about safety. Something about being in there with the 18 wheelers and a 35 mph crosswind. I figured there was a wide range of probability as to the outcome if our tires kissed, not all of them bad.) I made a mental note to ask Mike Brown or Tom Lambrecht. But before I could, I opened that book to another random page, and there it was - If the tires touch, the back rider *will* go down. We'd have to find another magic bullet.
We flew in my health/fitness/nutrition guru, Ariel, to Las Vegas for a little adjustment/rolfing, Ariel is one of the fittest guys I know. He rode with us from the parking lot of the Rio out to Hoover Dam. I can't reconstruct how the ride went from a walk in the park to dangerous, but after 7 1/2 hours across the desert, Ariel looked at the last rise up to Hoover Dam and said No Mas. I said I'll switch bikes with you, you can have the faster one. He said, no, I don't think I need to do that hill. I blocked out what he said next until today when he reminded me. He had said, " If you do this every day, you'll die."
So we took the next day off to fix the bikes and the RV, although I couldn't have ridden if everything had been ready to go - I had left what's left of my pituitary on the desert floor on that ride to hoover dam. The next day a nice ride in Zion, then 4 days averaging 50 miles. A scheduled day off in Winslow AZ where I beat the mayor in a game of 9 Ball, then two straight 70 mile days.
Ariel has suggested (in this order) that we not do this ride, build up much slower, not ride more than 3 or 4 hours a day. Now my body doesn't seem to want to make the hormone that keeps me hydrated, no matter how much I drink. It's another scheduled day off in Taos.
