NCNCA District Team Time Trial Championships – Mens 45+ Ken Hill (author), Mike Pugh, Scott Wienker, Chris Bowlus July 9, 2011 Livermore, CA

Ken, Mike, and Scott (Chris not pictured) fighting the Altamont winds.<br />

It all started as most things do, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get a bunch of the Masters E45 guys together to do the District TTT?”  With little to no planning, other than few emails, our DBC team of Scott Wienker, Mike Pugh, Chris Bowlus and Ken Hill were signed up and with no practice time together before the race, we decided to figure it all out the morning of the TTT. We had to leave Davis at 5:30 a.m. to get there early enough for our 8:22 am start and so we could drive the course. The course started out on the edge of Livermore and wound its way out towards the Altamont Pass. The race was 15.7 miles long, out and back with rolling hills with a decent climb on the way back, oh and wind, lots of wind, as in it was hard keeping the car in my lane wind….hmmmm. 

We all did our warm-ups and as Chris and I headed to the start line from the car, Chris noticed his front tire was flat. We switched his front wheel with a spare I had brought along and we marveled at how smart we were for bringing a spare TT front wheel, little did we know that this ingenious thought would be Chris’ undoing.  Four minutes to start and we all gathered to figure out our plan, “Uhh, what order do we want to ride?” We decided smallest to biggest and we were staged ready to go. Mike took the first pull and he was going hard. We rotated through a few times and started to hit the downhill roller sections and now we were moving. I was leading at about the 3-4 mile mark and our speed kept creeping up, we rounded a curve at around 45mph and bam! We slammed into a crazy side wind that nearly knocked the bars out of my hands; I took one hand off the aero bar and one onto the side bar and dared not move anymore.  I figured one millisecond not supporting my bars in this wind may be disasterous. I kept going and as we started to regroup, we saw that Chris had dropped behind, little did we know, as Chris came around the corner with the side wind, he was sent into a vicious speed wobble.  Somehow, he got it slowed down and saved it. The 3 of us decided to keep pressing on hoping Big (Chris) could latch back on. The rest of the way to the turnaround was a blur as we covered the out leg, 7.5 miles in 12:27, yep 36mph average. 

We turned around and now the blast of the wind could really be felt, 20mph was hard to do and we still had to climb back up those hills. We started the uphill sections and just in front of us, we could see the team that started 2 minutes ahead of us. Mike and Scott were taking incredible pulls, even though at times we were only going 15mph. We caught and passed the team in front of us and now we were starting the climb, “Crud, I have never climbed anything more than an overpass on my TT bike. I hope I can hang on…” Fifteen…14…12 and down to 11mph, we got to the top of the climb and start the last 3 miles to the end, but now we have another problem, Scott’s bike won’t go back into the big chain ring, good thing he can spin! We push as hard as we can with Scott’s spinning as fast as he can and with a mile to go, we see another team in front of us. We almost catch them and the 3 of us cross the line together with Chris left to battle the winds alone. 

eam Trial 45 + District Champions Mike Pugh, Scott Wienker, Chris Bowlus, Ken Hill

With 5 teams in our Masters 45+ class, we had to wait a bit for other teams to finish, but we didn’t have to wait too long to see that DBC crushed it, finishing about 2:30 seconds ahead of second place and with 3rd fastest time of the day!

What a great team and big thanks to my teammates for doing this race and bringing DBCRT another District Championship! 

Ken Hill