Today was a busy day. I had to be in Leadville, Colorado early in the morning to meet Lance Armstrong for a reconnaissance ride of the Leadville 100 mountain bike race course. Why do we need a recon ride of a course I’ve ridden several times (between camps, recon rides, and the race itself, I’ve been on the course probably 10 times) and Lance has already seen at least three times? Because it’s a mountain bike course and it changes based on rainfall, snow, and erosion.

For much of the course, there’s no real difference from one year to the next, but in some places there are significant changes in the line a rider needs to take in order to stay on the bike or maintain maximum speed. For instance, on the Powerline descent, a steep, rutted, nasty descent under high-tension lines, erosion is always a major issue. The descent only takes minutes to get down, but if you choose to go left where you really should go right, your rapid descent can easily turn into a trip to the hospital. The ruts on Powerline are deep  and run almost parallel to the direction you’re headed. That’s a problem because if you slide into one with your front wheel or both wheels, you’re most likely going to crash. And because of the depth of the ruts, you’re also likely to completely destroy at least one of your wheels in the process.

Knowing where the ruts are is also important for the return trip to Leadville, when you have to climb Powerline. The ascent is steep, and if you’re on the wrong side of one of those deep ruts, you won’t have the speed to cross it and maintain your traction. This means you’ll have to stop and push your bike up the hill until you can remount. All but the top 10-15 finishers in the race end up walking on some portion of the Powerline climb, in fact I’ve only seen a handful of people get up the first section without putting a foot down (one of them was a rider at our Leadville Training Camp last year, and another was Lance).

The other place where first-hand knowledge of the course is crucial is the top of the Columbine Climb. The final mile or so of the 10-mile climb gets narrow, steep, and can be very rocky. As with Powerline, it’s helpful to see it beforehand so you can find the best lines through the rocks in a low-pressure situation instead of a race situation.

Interestingly, Lance and I did a recon ride last year about this time, too. It was the end of July and only about a dozen people knew that he was planning on returning to professional cycling and planning to ride the 2009 Tour de France. Today, almost exactly a year later, it was nice to be back in Leadville riding with a guy who was standing on the podium on the Champs Elysees just two weeks ago. What a difference a year makes.

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