"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

Wow. Very cool. What is she trying to set a record for?

@G - The world time trial championships are held in Borrego Springs every year in early November. It is an approx 20 mile loop on public roads. She is hoping to beat the course womens distance record for a 24 hour attempt which is just over 500 miles (i cant bremember exact number) We went there last year for the event to suss it out and she did a 12 hr rip on it. Things went well

JFC! I realize we're talking road course here, but the difference between that and what she's done in her two 22hr marathons in this race are absolutely nuts. And those were already crazy numbers.

Yea complete apples and oranges. Time trail is sustained power output, maintaining aero position, and staying on the bike. She is right in the pocket in terms of where she needs to be.

I'm just jealous that she gets to buy a TT bike now.

unfortunately it looks like she is going to have to make due with a top end loaner bike from the new coach. He's pretty fired up about this fall.

SPC ate it pretty hard tonight while going around cedar falls. The river flooded the bike path pretty bad and she was coming around a corner and there was a bunch of silt and before she could blink her bike slid right out from underneath. Shes a little banged up so she canned it early to do a mental reset. Weather looking ossum for tomorrow. Spc is looking to establish some seperation over the next few days so they should be quite long

What I presume to be the offending silt, or at least a representative sample.

Sorry it happened, but glad that 1) her bike is OK, 2) she is mostly OK, and 3) it happened somewhere with a nearby motel and medical services should she have needed them.

What Garick wrote. Also huge congratulations to SPC on being asked to join the team.

sick

SPC in Illinois, across the Mississippi!

Just occurred to me. I'm taking off Saturday for a road trip. Going to visit friends in Arkansas, then who knows? Tentatively thinking Smoky Mtns area, never been.

What occurred is, SPC will likely put more miles on her bike than I will in the car. She's a beast. GO SPC!

when i was in college, new belgium brewing, which was easily one of the most popular breweries in Colorado, most famous for their fat tire ale, was very staunch and firm that they didn't have the production capacity to serve the east coast nor wanted to deal with the logistics of shipping beer out there (beer is very finicky, spoils easily, & needs to be consumed fresh - what people at anheuser busch did to be able to deliver bud light across the globe and a bud light in dubai tastes identical to one purchased in new york or tokyo is perhaps the greatest feat ever accomplished in brewing - been on many brewery tours, usually someone in the tour makes a disparaging comments towards bud and usually the tour guide will say "we chose a different path from them, but we highly admire what they do and couldn't do it ourselves while we are sure if they wanted to make a hoppy ipa they certainly could)

anyway, so new belgium brewing would always warn you that if you were ever drinking their beer east of the mississippi, it was smuggled there

so whenever anything crosses the mississippi from west to east - in my mind, it's always leaving the land of fat tire, which should bode well for the surfaces she has laying ahead of her 😀

The reports are that in this section there would be areas with high weeds and it should be done during the day. There has been a lot of bushwacking. SPC had to climb a fence and carry her bike over it this morning so when she came to a section that was really thick she assumed more bushwacking and she went along till she was up to her ass in wild parsnip. There had been a rerout she was not aware of. If you dont know what wild parsnip rash looks like google it but be prepared. She thinks she cleaned it all off and is making a stop to be certain in the next town. The weather is aces and she is planning on throwing down a 200 mile day to start seperation from the riders near her as trail conditions are expected to improve and she is well fueled and feeling strong

The management of this run seems incompetent at best. Is this some new group putting this thing on or are the reroutes normal? Seems nuts that apparently nobody actually traveled the route before sending these people out to ride it with no support.

i really didn't want to be overly negative towards them because i'm a huge fan of their efforts to put something like this together and really want to do it in the future (may join them for the loop around montana in august)- but i couldn't believe the levels of "no clue but we'll figure it out" i received in my communications with them even less than a month before the race started

in fact, the only useful information i got on the race was not from the race people but from a facebook group spc directed me to of race participants who were sharing what they learned

they couldn't answer basic questions like "will i need a mountain bike or will a touring bike be sufficient" and as shown by jen's experience, they still don't know even though it started a month ago - that was a huge "wtf is going on, how can they organize a 3k mill race and not even be capable of telling the riders if they'll be doing anything that requires a mountain bike"

for those who are unfamiliar with this stuff - that is a huge variable, while it was clear that taking a road bike was out of the question - if the race always stayed on regular paths then it'd be significantly easier a ride on a much lighter touring bike with far less moving parts which could go kaput on you

it's the equivalent of telling someone to plan for a 10 mile walk and letting them know that it was 50/50 chance of walking through an air conditioned mall and 50/50 chance of being dropped into the middle of the mojave and telling them to just figure it out, i'll pick you up tomorrow at noon for the walk

no joke, whenever i spoke to people about my tentative plans to do the race and they had very basic questions about the route and such and my answer was always "no idea because they don't know either" and everyone's immediate response was "this sounds like a terrible idea, are you sure they know what they are doing"

they do a number of west coast rides (Seattle to LA stuff) which seems to be doing well, i'm very optimistic that this was just a "best way to figure this out is to just do it"

but it's very apparent they are playing it by ear, not actually having ridden nor even scouted the route ahead of time

however, i am in full support of them and love that they are doing it, perhaps i don't know enough about how the sausage is made to understand that it's always like that for the first annual of any lengthy race for x, y, z reasons, but nevertheless, i was very sketched out in all my communications with them - felt more like i was responding to a craig's list ad for a $25 couch than talking to the organizer of a cross country race

Agree with RR - the organizers are really nice people and have the best intentions. This is the first year of the event and I think its the first big "gravel" event they have put on. I dont believe I mentioned that they did not warn SPC about the dengers of the reservation she rode through in the middle of the night. She was warned by multiple women in stores and shops without provocation that is "was not safe to be a woman alone". It really put her in a not cool position - I nearly drove there to get her and ring the organizers necks. They ended up allowing the women behind her to reroute. I had no idea they were even routed through a res

BIG WTF

Go go go

Awesome stuff

woah i missed that part, i went to school with two kids from a rez, two of the hardest kids i've ever met in my life, most of their stories were how shocked they were by how people would just sit their backpack down and not watch it etc etc

one went back after college and was murdered less than a year after graduation, lost touch with the other

your average reservation has 2.5x the murder rate of the rest of the country, the more dangerous ones are 20x

they are also major drug trafficking hubs

even as a 6'2" male, i would not feel comfortable riding solo through backcountry in a rez, just need to come across one drunken guy out in his a pickup for terrible things to happen

this american life has an amazing episode on this and how this woman became a private investigator to solve all the murders after her niece was killed and she was the one who had to solve it because cops were too swamped with other murders and jurisdiction issues

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/706/a-m...

Good posts above. Interesting reads. I noticed on the dot watching that the only other woman riding who didn't turn white for "sport mode" was skipping the res, and was frankly glad. An 18yo from Scotland who's been doing about 50 miles/day soloing through the rez seemed really iffy.

The slapdash organization has also been eye opening. Hope the wild parsnip doesn't get SPC. I've heard nasty stories about that stuff.

@G - MD (other non sport F) contacted SPC about her experience with the res. The organizers wanted to reclassify MD to sport if she rerouted. SPC called them out and said no fcuking way she should be reclassified MD would be in danger going through and must rerout and deserves to maintain her status.

Nice! Really glad to hear it. When I saw her te-roite I was a bit concerned she'd get reclassified, Glad SPC helped out and sanity prevailed.

How'd u get so lucky, squiders?

I simply got very lucky. However, I did my personal best to mess it up in the beginning so there is that.

Trail is very slow going but improving. SPC still planning on a big ride today/tonight as wel as tomorrow with the weather conditons being perfect.

The key is to spend many hours in the Venetian poker room. As all love stories begin.

I hadn't considered the route going through a reservation. Thinking about it now, it's sort of hard to go through South Dakota into Nebraska without hitting one. At least in that part of the country, I'd imagine they're not stoked about non-res folks in general. Wounded Knee wasn't that long ago.

I kinda get the feeling that anybody who's dumb enough to **** around with SPC ends up wishing they hadn't.