The End is Near

It's not every morning that you open the local newspaper to find a color photo of your butt plastered across page 1B (West Valley section). Above the fold, I might add. Bigger than the photo of fellow cyclist Lance Armstrong on page 1C (Sports section, below the fold). There I am in the foreground, the sleeve of my yellow jacket dangling from the rear pocket of my jersey. The photographer (Pauline Lubens) was positioned near the top of the final steep section before the finish, so I had ample time to observe her as I crawled slowly upward. She was concentrating on rear shots, and I was silently grateful for that pesky sleeve - ha! I look sloppy, I am not photo-worthy.

What do I know?

I know what's it like to climb Sierra Road on a bicycle. The start is daunting - you turn off Piedmont and you face the first challenge, a long section that just goes straight up. There are worse bits ahead, but it's especially intimidating whenever you can see a whole climb laid out before you. Before you reach the top (some 3.7 miles later), it changes from being steep, to painfully steep, to slightly less steep, to I-can't-believe-it's-getting-really-steep again, to a downward slope that's too short to gain momentum for the uphill finish. Steep enough to split up the pro peloton when they have faced it toward the end of a Tour of California stage. My bike computer tells me that the climb averages 9.9%. There are a few sections that seem comparatively flat - even somewhat downhill - so that means that most of the climb exceeds 10%.

I reappear in the closing shot of the Mercury News slideshow, in the background as the men crowd around to see their results. I enjoyed watching the photographer positioned behind the easel, holding the camera high overhead, and wondered how those shots would turn out.

When the pro peloton roars through with fresh legs on Tuesday, perhaps they will stay together. I'll empathize with the sprinters at the back - I expect that our suffering is comparable on that hill. I may be hiking it on Tuesday - cycling up in the pouring rain may not be the best plan, but descending it would be worse.