Adrian's Tour Divide
My friend Adrian just finished the Tour Divide race, a bike ride along the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico. That's a long time in the saddle. Congrats Adrian!
Adrian writes:
[These photos were] taken along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico (border of Mexico) from June 13 to July 7. This is the longest mountain bike route in the world at 2711 miles with 200,000 ft of climbing. But don't worry, half of it was downhill :-) My odometer clocked it at 2830 miles with the one detour I had in Grand Teton National Park to go to a bike shop for repairs, and the many times I made a wrong turn along the way. 15 riders lined up in Banff to race the route, 14 guys and one girl. 6 guys dropped out, 6 guys finished so far, and 3 riders are still riding in the monsoonal rains of July in New Mexico.
Congrats to Adrian! I was the Tour Divide racer trailing him by one spot for the last three weeks of the race, and I had heard so much about him that was intriguing. E.g., missed food drops, endless shifting problems, etc. At one point he even went something like 40 miles off-course (total) to Jackson, WY to get some mechanical problems fixed, giving me a chance to catch him later that night except that then I got a flat tire and was out of good spare tubes so I to stop. I knew that I had missed my only chance to catch him and that he would get farther ahead each day as he was clearly motivated. He had my full respect!
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