Immunity Pump and Kitchen Creek

August 9th - Check out the Immunity Pump. Brian Brillo, last weeks winner of the immunity challenge, had a task to do one better than Joy Muehlenbein...I think he did. He's pictured here with Scott Kaplan. Brian added handle bars, reflectors, streamers, brake handles and water bottle cage complete with CAF water bottle. The thing still works as well. Very, very impressive. It's a work of art.

I must stay that I am very pleased with the work this years contestant are putting into this challenge. It's not easy to know what is right and wrong but they all are focusing on the elements which are important; CAF, QMDC and XX1090 (the Scott and BR Show). By the way, you can view the Final 10 on the web page now.

Kitchen Creek is a ride that many seasoned cyclists from the San Diego area will be familiar with or have heard of. It starts in a remote location, Pine Valley just off the 8 about 40 plus miles out of town. You can image that as you head in that direction, towards Arizona, that as the temperature rises it becomes more desert like. Reports indicated we would see upper close to 90 degrees today.

However, as riders started to show up the temperature was a cool 50 plus degrees. Makes you think you should start this ride with some arm warms or vest. That's a mistake. Within 10 minutes you will be plenty warm since immediately we start to climb. But before we get a few blocks out of town I hear, what sounds like, a gun shot. Someone had a flat. Since we are at 3000 feet above sea level you need to put a bit less air in your tires. My guess would be over inflation.

After making the left onto kitchen creek road and half way up this climb....I have a flat. I was keeping pace with the 1-2 group at this point but now they are over the top. I check for what may have caused the flat (nothing), pull out my spare, make the change and pump up the new tire. It goes flat as well. OK, frustration is setting in. Adam Beck had stopped to help and then Joe Weickgenant showed up. Joe offers a tube and since I use a very long stem, 80mm on my ZIPP wheels, a valve extender was needed. We give that a go using a floor pump that a nice man stopped and offered us. Finally, success. I was ready to call it a day after 3 flats but am back on the road.

We climb the rest of the way together and catch group 3 and some of 2 at the SAG stop just before turning onto Sunrise Highway. By now we have climb about 3000 feet and up in the wooded area providing some coolness to the temps.

The rest of the ride was pretty much rolling hills, some fast down hill and a bit of flat. The wind picked up some but not too bad. We split the group into two small ones to accommodate the skinny roads.

Upon returning to the starting point there were a lot of smiling, exhausted, faces. I think we all feel a sense of accomplishment when we finish something like this. We climbed over 5300 feet in 57 miles way above sea level.