Well, day one started pretty terrible. We started at our team's start on Dairy Ashford south of I-10 at 6:10am and rode up to the actual start at the Omni on Park Row. Never again. We ended up on the back of the start there and didn't actually get to start until well after 7am. Not worth getting up at 4am for. We will either go back to starting at our house and just accept the risk of riding down Clay Road to Barker Cypress, or will start with the team again and turn left on the feeder road and bypass the start line at the Omni next year.
My wife got two flats before the first breakpoint...and it was my fault. She got a flat the previous weekend, and while changing the tube, I noticed the rim tape was in bad shape around some of the spoke holes. So I replaced it Wednesday night...with tape that was apparently too narrow for the rim. 16mm instead of 19mm. It seemed to have covered all the rim holes when I installed it, but when the tire was inflated, it apparently slipped into the hole just enough to expose an edge and wear on the tube. We got that fixed at BP#1, but changing the two flats and then waiting at the BP to let Bike Barn fix my screwup took a while and put us very near the back of the pack.
Once we got going again, things were fine until after lunch, when it started really warming up over the fresh new asphalt. My Garmin showed 95F during a good chunk of the last half of the ride, and sitting in the sun at the last BP, it was showing 106F. My MS starts shutting my energy level down at anything over about 85F, so I just had to slow down and grind out the last 30 miles or so. My wife took more than her share of the pulls for the last 30-40 miles which helped a lot. That lady in Fayetteville with the garden hose spraying riders with water was an angel! I almost turned around and went back to ask her to spray my other side. We finished pretty late due to the slow start and the delays with the flats (I think it was after 3pm), and I just had to sit there with some ice on my neck and head for about 30 minutes to get feeling human again.
Day 2 was short and sweet, and went by really fast. I was still pretty beat from the heat on day 1, but the cool weather was fine and got us to lunch at 9:20am. Took the express route, which was quite uncrowded this year...probably because the park was open finally. I thought the roads were ok past Bastrop...not great, but ok...really loved the tailwind on 535. The finish was somewhat anticlimactic compared to the run-in to downtown Austin...wish they would find a way to get some people out cheering further from the finish line, but not sure how to do that. We finished just before noon...11:50 or so and felt fine...not tired at all.
My thoughts on the finish line are that it obviously needs improvement, but I can understand some growing pains as they adapt to the new location. My overall impression though was that they didn't think their traffic control through very well. They pretty much setup the finish to force the vast majority of the riders and their friends/families to have to cross the finish line at least once, and then didn't have anything approaching adequate control over the crossing zones. They would have been much better off with making the finish line end at a T, with short runouts to the right and left, and the bike corral off the end of either side of the T to allow riders to go to the side their team tent was on. Then, they should have had the parking trams picking up riders and others right by the bike corral instead of down in the middle of the team tents. Better traffic control up in the parking area also would have been helpful to keep the trams running as well. Having cars and the trams trying to use the same roads to move through there was a giant CF that kept thousands of people waiting for trams in the heat for well over an hour. I hope they send out a survey and reach out to the teams for input, because there are lots of ways to make that finish line experience better than it was.
Overall, hard to complain too much though. We got to ride in near perfect weather, with a tailwind, both days, and raised millions of dollars for the fight against MS. What is not to like? Thanks again to everybody who rode, volunteered, raised funds, etc.! Y'all are my heroes!