At the last minute, I signed up for the Santa Cruz Mountains Challenge -- it's a road bike century ride in the Santa Cruz mountains along the central California coast. The "Challenge" part comes from the fairly significant amount of climbing that's involved.
The 100 mile option has just over 11,000 feet of climbing. For the past two years, they've offered a "Double Metric" or 200k (about 120 mi.) with a total of about 15,000' of climbing.
I opted for the shorter 100 mi., 11k' version.
At the top of the timed Jamison Rd Hill Climb, I connected with an older gentleman I noticed earlier in the day. He looked like a vintage rider from back in the day. What first struck me was that he was not wearing a helmet. I'm not the "helmet police", but I do know that ride organizers usually have a pretty strict policy regarding helmets and I was surprised they hadn't yanked him from the course.
As we talked and recovered from the timed hill climb, I learned that this man was on the US cycling team in 1960 (before I was born) and again in 1964. In 1965, he was the US national champion, and traveled to Europe and raced in Italy. He also once held the US double transcontinental record (Santa Monica - Atlantic City - Santa Monica)
Victor Vincente of America
Victor (Born Michael Hiltner) was also inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1989 for early innovation and promotion of the sport of mountain biking.
MTB Hall of Fame: Victor Vincente
My Friend Sky, who operates Velocult.com, owns one of the supposed 26 Topanga mountain bikes produced by VVA: Topanga!
So anyway... My thoughts are this... You may be surrounded by interesting people and have no idea unless you take the opportunity to break the ice.
There are a lot of folks out there with an interesting story to tell.
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