In November of 2013 I had a post crowing about how swell I did in a big, gnarly race up a giant mountain in the Taiwan KOM Challenge. In the interest of fairness and accuracy, I feel it necessary to report on the 2014 edition of the race - I abandoned. Let the excuses commence: Though I’d had a great performance in a stage race in The Philippines a few weeks prior, my fitness fell apart immediately following that race. So it was a triple whammy of that lack of fitness, the continuing lack of lung capacity from the cold that put the kibosh on said fitness, and the cold, heavy rain that lashed us from before the start. While I actually had a very positive mental attitude on the start line, that quickly went to hell! The air wasn’t too cold down at sea level, but the rain was cold and pouring down. And as this race does nothing but climb into colder temps with elevation, it went from bad to worse. This road up has a particularly demoralizing feature - a descent of a few kilometers in length and quite a few hundred meters of elevation, about 2/3 of the way up or so. It’s a rather cruel twist after you’ve been working so hard to gain that elevation, you have to give some back. And knowing how much colder I was going to get on the descent, and how badly I was shivering while still going up, I got off the bike and very fortunately into a van out of the rain a few kilometers before the descent. Not how I’d planned for the day to go and definitely not one of my finer moments on a bike, but memorable to be sure.
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