16 September 2008

Waves to Wine 2008

This past weekend was the 25th annual Waves to Wine event in California. The event is a fundraiser benefit for the California chapter of the MS Society. My wife Michelle, who works for The North Face, signed us up through work.

This was a massive event - I've never done anything like it. I have to respect how well-organized the entire thing was, from start to finish. There ended up being 2000 registered riders, the majority doing the 75 mile route both Saturday and Sunday. There was also a century route for the more adventurous, along with a half-century as well.




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We walked our bikes and gear over to ATT Park, about a mile from our house at 6AM on Saturday, to find the parking lot already thronged with bikers & support crew. After dropping our bags off with the truck, we hooked up with the other North Facers, all resplendent in their sleek black jerseys. Of course, everyone was gravitating around the breakfast tents, trying to load up on last-minute calories before the start.

To cope with the massive amount of riders, they were staging the departures, and we were slotted for a 7AM start. As we all rolled out of the starting gate, they had what seemed like 15 volunteers just ringing cowbells and cheering us on.

We were in a huge pack of cyclists as we cruised up the Embarcadero, around the tip of the peninsula, and up to the Golden Gate Bridge. I had never biked over the bridge before, and it was spectacular. Once across the bridge, we dropped down into Sausalito and up into the Marin headlands, over Mt. Tam. Oh man, were there some huge hills there! That is where some extra training could have come in handy, without a doubt. There were a lot of people struggling to get up those hills. Somehow, I managed to get behind a dude with a boom box strapped to the back of his bike, and he was blasting out the tunes, which was semi-annoying, and semi-helpful...at least he could have been playing Eye of the Tiger or something!

But make it to the top we did, and this is what we saw:


The calm Pacific view helped drop my heart rate back to normal. From there, we wound along the coast past Stinson Beach & Point Reyes, then headed inland to Cotati, where we camped out for the night.

On Sunday, we wound around to Sebastopol, and then up to Healdsburg. Day 2 was a much mellower ride, but after the first day, it was still pretty challenging. The rolling hills of wine country were amazing, I can't wait to get back and explore more of those back roads.

A great part of the whole ride was how well-organized it was, There were rest stops every 10 miles or so, with Gatorade, water, snacks and also mechanics to make sure everyone's bikes were in top shape. On top of that they had support cars going up & down the route, helping out if anyone had any problems.


Rest stop on day 2

All in all it was a great weekend, and a great event that ended up raising close to 2 million dollars to benefit the MS Society.Now we know we're going to start training for next year now! Maybe by that time we'll be bold enough to go for the century ride...or maybe not.

3 comments:

Sean P. Hutchinson said...

Do you think North Face would be interested in sponsoring me, or, alternately, would you and Michelle adopt me?

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