Ride Brasil 2012 - Day 1

Pre race
Trever and I arrived in Salvador on Thursday afternoon after a three flight trip. There is a  four hour time difference so jet lag was an issue for us so we took a nap and headed to dinner.  That night we slept for almost 12 hours and next day we headed to do some touristy stuff. On Friday we walked near the beach, went to a marine museum and just lounged around. Nothing exciting.

Saturday we met the shuttle that would take us to Mucuge at 7:30 am at the airport. Bus was supposed to take 6 hrs but it took a lot longer than that. We didn't leave until almost 9 am so we didn't arrive until almost 6. No chance to preride the prologue course. We built the bikes, found a room, and got the lay of the land.
 
We decided to pre ride on the morning of the prologue and made the mistake of assuming we knew where we were going and rode for 30 minutes before we realized we were on going the wrong way. Once we found the course we decided to still preride even though we had already ridden about 1 hour. As we started , less than mile from the start, Trever sheared off the spindle of one of his pedals. Luckily he didn't go down.  So we went back go the room to get the spare pedals we brought. To make the story short. We ended up riding almost 3 hours and that's before racing.

Prologue
The start was interesting. They started us out 2 teams at a time. The team that we started with was not very fast so we quickly moved ahead. As we were going through the same spot where Trever broke his pedal I hit a rock and tore a chunk off the sidewall of my tire and it went flat in 3 seconds! We changed it pretty quickly in around 3 minutes. We got going again and started passing folks. The course had 3 sections of singletrack with the middle section having some VERY technical sections and quite a bit of sandy sections as well. I was on a roll passing people left and right, but Trever was having a hard time getting around folks. I stopped a couple of times to make sure he was still there and hadn't had a mechanical  When I hit a sandy uphill section (we walked it on the preride) I was feeling strong and rode the thing and moved ahead of Trever. I think this is where Trever pushed too hard getting up the hill and started to struggle.

To get to the last section of singletrack we had to ride on the road for about 1.5 miles. Straight uphill - steep bugger. I had Trever hold on to my jersey as I pushed up the hill. Once in the last piece of singletrack, we just had a little more climbing to do and then all downhill to the finish - almost. That's when a mixed team we had passed earlier passed us. Both were strong climbers but had no tech skills. The guy let us go by but the gal was stubborn and would not get out of the way. She even got off and was walking as we were riding. Bee-atch!!!  We finally got around her almost at the bottom - a little pissed to say the least.

We finished in 1:20 good for 13th place out of about 30 teams. Twenty minutes behind the master winners. We could have done a 1:10 but tomorrow is another day and the hardest of the race so I'm sure we'll move up. Still 6 days to go. Stay tuned.