Tucson- Day 8 (Mammoth)

Today all of us went to the pool except Darian. The girls really didn’t want to get into the water which was understandable. But they sucked it up for warm up and actually both swam longer than me. My shoulders suck. I don’t even want to count how many times I’ve said that. But it’s true. I guess it’s partly also because of all the cycling. I think I swam about 300m (or I guess yards) before realizing it was just stupid to swim. All three guys started the bike from the pool and us girls planned to get dropped off at the usual Subway. With the chaperones in front, all five of us kept our eyes peeled for it. We were really confused when we couldn’t find it and more Subway’s kept coming up on the GPS. We kept driving, thinking it must be ahead. Big fail when we were at mile 90 on the highway and called Gary. He told us we had passed it at mile 79, and to get out to start riding at mile 95. So we unloaded and got going. We realized with the amount we had missed, it was not far until the start of the descent. Mammoth is a town that we get to after a 12 mile descent. We stop at the circle K gas station at the bottom before beginning the climb on the way back. When we stopped this time, we really hadn’t worked too hard yet. So we got the news that Gary now wanted us to bike all the way back to the house. By now we were frustrated with how the day at turned out and not very excited for what was sure to be a long hard ride. It ended up being not as bad as I thought. I felt pretty good during the climb after having our easier day. We kept looking carefully for the Subway on the way back, as we still needed a bit of a break. We needed to use their washroom as well as grab some food. With our bars and stuff in the other vehicle, it had been several hours since we’d eaten. We recognized other things around it we had seen, but there was no way it would have been visible to us coming from the other side without actually knowing where it was. We really weren’t looking forward to the ride back home, so we were pretty excited when we found out it was only another 20km. Not miles, as we’d thought. Pretty sure we’ve never loved metric more. The guys finally passed us on the way. They did such a long ride today! We spent about 4 hours and 15 minutes on our bikes; they did even more because of starting earlier. Despite confusion throughout the day, everything worked out alright and it was a long day for us all. Oh, and I ate a bug. Surprisingly it was the first one that flew into my mouth while riding this trip. More training to come, more blogging to come. Thanks for reading.