Tom Bartlett of Sacramento, California, was not only one of the best track and criterium racers in the state, he was also an occasional bike race promoter who had a reputation for coming up with interesting, unique, and sometimes extremely difficult courses for his races. It was with this knowledge that I submitted myself to one of his new courses. While those in the know said that the course was a death march, Tom insisted that it wasn't so bad; after all, it finished at the same elevation as it started, it never got over 3000 feet in elevation, it was on roads in the Sierra Foothills with virtually no traffic, and it was only 58 miles. Tom was correct on all counts.
Tom did not advertise the fact that it would be 106 degrees in Sacramento (and somewhat hotter in Volcano) on the day of the race, that it was almost all hills (some of which had slopes in excess of fifteen percent), and that the surface of the roads resembled that of Beiruit, Lebanon. We would soon find this out on a course that consisted of a three mile long pan handle attached to a 26 mile torture-fest of a loop that we would ride twice.
I had never before ridden a course this arduous, so I decided to proceed somewhat conservatively. It was clear that some of the riders were feeling the extreme heat when, halfway into the first of the two laps, a corner on a climb revealed a patch of shade with an accompanying stream, and a few riders chose to surrender right then and there. A moment later, Lindsay Crawford dramatically accelerated on one of the steep uphills. Nobody could dream of matching such an effort, and even some of those who knew Lindsay's legendary abilities thought that such a move was folly. Well, it wasn't folly.
So up and down we went in the extreme heat, riders expiring one after another. Some of the uphills were so steep that one could hear the riders' shoes squeaking. As we approached a curve on a steep downhill, a rider ahead of me had his rear tire explode. Because his rim was so hot, the glue holding the tire to the rim had melted. Remarkably, after the inevitable shearing off of the valve had occured, the wheel itself stopped, and the now deflated tire performed several revolutions around the rim before it came off in a rather undramatic fashion, leaving the rider with nothing but metal between him and the road. We gave him plenty of room to wrestle with his newly discovered beast, and he managed to bring the screaming pile of metal to a stop a short distance before the curve.
When we came to the shady spot with the creek on the second lap, one of the riders who had called this place home over an hour earlier was still lying on his back in the water, looking like he would never leave this oasis. A short time later, Michael Hieb, who excelled only under such unusually difficult conditions, quietly rode away from us. I attempted to keep up with him but he was a true roadie indeed. After a couple of miles, I could no longer hang on, but decided to keep up a good pace with the net result that I never saw Michael nor the pack again.
As I turned onto the panhandle of the course at three miles to go, I was informed that neither Michael nor the pack were anywhere close to me, but I continued to move quickly just because I simply wanted to return to civilization. As I approached the finish, the race's referees (who had some great shade) couldn't have looked more relaxed, however my appearance was duly noted. And then I saw him: Lindsay Crawford had had the time after winning the race to get cleaned up, change clothes, put his bike away, go to the store and buy the paper, and then sit down on a nice bench to read the paper and eat his well deserved snack. He was so squeaky clean, one could have never guessed that he had cracked a sweat that day.