Welcome to Minnesota! And as your welcome gift we'd like to give you 125 miles of wind.
Well, we made it to our 7th state. The home of 10,000 lakes. We are solidly in the Midwest, and even though I never lived in Minnesota I started to feel a bit at home. The smell, the humidity, the corn fields, it all reminded me of the many years I spent in Ohio and Wisconsin. It is so hard to believe that in just a couple days I'll be in those familiar lands.
Today's ride was anything but uneventful. 11 miles in one of the guides stopped us because they discovered that we were headed towards a gravel road, which caught them off guard and after yesterday (more on that below) they didn't want us on any more gravel. So we all had to regroup so that they could guide us to the intended route.
Great. We made it through that and were chugging along until we hit an aid stop around mile 30-32. The guides discovered the route was actually all messed up and that we would've had 16 gravel sections today. So they frantically tried to update the route and our Garmin devices, but the cable they had wasn't a data cable. Luckily, I had a very nicely organized cable bag, which was very easy to grab from the luggage trailer, and was able to give them my Garmin cable. They updated a couple devices and sent us on our way. The rest of us got our devices updated at lunch, hence the two Stava posts for today.
Beyond the route issues, the ride was actually extremely hard today. 125 miles on its own is challenging, both physically and mentally. But, when you add a full day of unrelenting cross and head winds, it can push you to some really dark places. All I can do it say thank you to the 6 other people I rode with today. As a group we did this even though we all wanted to stop at various points during the day.
Update on yesterday's ride. It turns out, yesterday wasn't as uneventful as I thought when I wrote my post. We had two different gravel sections. One was an actual gravel road so it was pretty compacted, but the second was about 1.5 miles of gravel that had just been put down in preparation for a new road. This second section was actually pretty tricky to navigate because it wasn't packed and the gravel was uneven. We knew that one person had gone down after we went through, but we thought he had just gotten some scratches. Turns out he broke his femur and had to have surgery this morning. And to make matters worse, he is the one person who was not from the US. He is from Saudi Arabia so the guides had a hard time getting ahold of his wife, who is now on her way to the US. He was also one of the nicest and most positive people on the trip so we were all bummed that he got injured so badly and won't be continuing with us.
And, as Steph mentioned in a comment on yesterday's post, I did go get a new watch. I tried to go without one, but I just couldn't. And yes, Mark, I did get a better watch. I got a newer version of the Apple Watch and one that currently works. Ha ha. I know that's not what you meant.
Day 25 stats:
distance: 125.9 miles
elevation gain: 2297 ft
nutrition:
breakfast: eggs, potatoes, french toast, cantaloupe, pineapple, NuGo protein bar
lunch: cheese pizza, cookies, 1 small coke
post-ride: 1 recovery drink, 1 small coke, pizza, orange
gels: 3
bloks: 1.5
78 oz skratch superfuel, 26 oz zym, 26 oz water
other: 1 small coke
Day 26 details - Fairmont to Austin
planned distance: 80 miles
planned elevation gain: 1326 ft