Current mood:	still sucking wind
Current music:	The Alan Parsons Project, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
Entry tags:	far above cayuga's waters, i know more people than you do, i want to ride my bicycle, i'll eat pretty much anything, photographic evidence, rocky mountain high, your hockey team sucks

Things to Do in Denver When You're Big Red (Part III)
I arose early yesterday, put on my cold weather riding gear, and headed downstairs with my rental bike. Alicia, the Denver TNT chapter's assistant coach for the group doing America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride (a.k.a. the Tahoe Century), picked me up at my hotel, and we managed to fit both our bikes in the back of her car. A short drive later, we were at Maple Grove Park in Golden, west of Denver, to meet the rest of the team. I'd foolishly forgotten to check whether my rental bike had water bottle cages, and we were about to figure out a way for me to give each of my two bottles to a different rider so I could get my water and my Accelerade handed off to me whenever I needed it (which probably would have been a huge pain in the ass), when team member Emily volunteered her bottle cages and her allen wrench tool to move them to my bike; she was wearing a camelback for her fluids anyway, so she didn't need them.

The main goal of the day's ride was to climb the switchback route up Lookout Mountain, but first we did fifteen miles in and around Golden, then the same fifteen miles back - past the Coors Brewery, and around some hilly but not awful terrain. The real problem was the brutal headwinds on our way out to Foothills Road - and for me, the additional problem was the thin air at this altitude. I was sucking wind most of the way, even after we turned around and caught the tailwinds.



We paused in downtown Golden for a photo:



Then the team set out to climb the aforementioned Lookout Mountain:



I was game to try, but one of my strengths as a bicyclist is that I know my limitations... and with the air problem, I just wasn't going to make it. A quarter of the way up, I let Alicia know I was heading back down and would wait for them after their descent. I grabbed a sandwich at Woody's Pizza, then hung out at Starbucks and nursed my rather uncomfortably hairy lungs until the group returned a while later. Then I rode back out to the park with Alicia, where we repacked the car and headed back to Denver. She was heading past the Bicycle Doctor on her way home anyway, so she very graciously just dropped me off at the hotel and returned the bike for me.

I didn't have time for a nap, just a shower, before the first ever all-Jesuit Frozen Four championship game, Boston College vs. Notre Dame. During the first intermission, Rita and I were chatting about post-game plans for the group when a random guy in a Cornell jersey approached us; turns out he lives in Denver and had actually made his choice about a job offer a year and a half ago based partly on the Frozen Four being here this year (and hoping that Cornell might make it, though this was definitely the wrong season for that).



The game itself was pretty exciting, though the final score wouldn't make you think so. Notre Dame, who had upset three "better" teams in the first three rounds to get to the finals, fought valiantly, and at one point had even scored what looked like their second goal to make the score 3-2, but the goal was called back, and BC put the nail in the coffin less than a minute later to make it 4-1.

Afterwards the group went to Appaloosa Grill on the 16th Street Mall for dinner, where I had a very good bison cheddarburger and a locally brewed New Belgium Mighty Arrow IPA.





I was pretty exhausted (and a little sunburnt) from the long day, so it was right off to bed with me.