A week or so ago, a post appeared on the Colorado Sportbike Club forums asking for escorts. The escorts would be taking officials or photographers around the bicycle portion of the EAS Boulder Peak Triathlon. Kevin Edwards posted his e-mail address and I decided I’d check it out.
I was pointed to this website to review the upcoming requirement, told that I’d get a t-shirt and a check for volunteering. He said I needed to be at the north end of the bicycle transition area by 5:45am. I told him sure I’d be interested and he asked for my t-shirt size, phone number and address for the check which I provided.
So I set the alarm this morning for 4:30am. For some reason though, at about 3am in a dream I kicked someone pretty hard and of course I did that in real life as well. Smashing my shin against the open door woke me up pretty handily. I tried to go back to sleep but the throbbing wasn’t cooperating so eventually at 4am I rolled out.
At about 4:45am, I put on my Aerostich and tucked a magazine and my mesh JR jacket into my Givi in case it got boring and/or warm and headed on out.
I followed Kevin’s advise and came in via the north side of the reservoir along the dirt roads. Only a couple of cars were in front of me. As I came over the rise, I could see a long long line of cars waiting to get into the parking area. I told them I was an escort and she waved me past everyone so I could find my spot.
After parking, I spotted a couple of motorcycles on the other side of the bikes and walked on over. When I found out that that’s where we should be parked, I went back and moved my motorcycle on up. I got some raised eyebrows. “Some who rides a Hayabusa in an Aerostich! Impossible.” Of course we talked bikes. They were appreciative that I had 61,100 miles on the Hayabusa. Of course I showed them my farkles including the horn.
Walking around checking out the bikes.
A pic of the escort motorcycles
The participants had to swim for 1.5k in the Boulder Reservoir, come up from the beach and to the bicycle transition area. There were 16 waves at 5 minute intervals. From there they’d ride out, up Olde Stage Road and back down Left Hand Canyon Drive. It was a total of 42k.
Afterwards they had to do a 10k run. It might have been around the reservoir, I’m not sure.
Anyway, we got assignments. Either we’d have a passenger on the back (official checking for rules compliance or a photographer) or we’d be sent around the loop to break up any obvious problems.
Some of the rules violations were drafting, littering (you can throw your bottles but they have to be around the aid stations), passing on the right, or listening to an iPod or other music device (basically headphones weren’t allowed).
These guys were in the bicycle transition area checking over their gear and making sure they were ready to go. Of course there’s my ‘busa and there were three (three!) Honda TransAlps there. Heck, had I known we were going to have so many, I’d have brought mine. Heck, I didn’t even know there were more than two in the entire state!
Here are the other two Transalps. Note the closer one has hard bags and a trunk. He has a cage on the front with two water bottles. It looks pretty set up.
I headed over to the concession stands to watch the start of the race.
It’s a little far away, but you can see the beginnings of splashing at the arch. After several minutes the first swimmer came from the beach. He ran through a kiddie pool filled with water (so the swimmers can rinse sand off before getting changed and into their bike gear) and then to the parking lot. He was a good 2 minutes ahead of the next swimmer. He must have been part dolphin or something.
Other motorcyclists left with photographers to get pics of the front runner and to set up on the course to get pics. We left about 30 minutes or so later after a good amount of bicyclists got on the road.
As we went around the course, the track official had me speed up to catch up with clumps of riders or slow down so he could get numbers for penalties. Looking at the map, we stayed on 36 to catch up with the earlier bikes as they came off of Left Hand Canyon Drive.
The cool thing was we were able to slip past traffic as they waited for bikes to go by. The cops would stop the cars and other bikes and wave us through when there was an opening.
I did my best to anticipate the official’s requests by speeding up when we were in areas with only one or two bikes since he was looking for drafting mainly. He spotted one guy passing on the right and another throwing a gatorade bottle well past the aid station. By the time we got back the first time, he had maybe a page and a half of a small notebook filled with numbers and the violations.
We made a second loop around with the first half of the loop being pretty sparse and then we stopped for the day (the race was to end at 11am but the bikes should be off by 9:30 or so which was when we got back from the second loop).
There were quite a few bikes on the road as you can see from the bike transition area:
I hung around for a bit and watched as the first of the marathoner’s completed the 10k.
All in all it was a pretty fun day. I’ll check out the other races and if they’ll have me, I’ll volunteer for another escort.