Cross Training on the Tioga Pass Road

Someone must have said “never give up an opportunity to train”, if not, then I just did.

So with Loz planning to take on California’s highest road, a 20km monster hill climb topping out at over 3,000m as a sacrifice to help Andy Schleck win this years Tour de France I played crew and managed to run sections of it as well, testing out my lungs, legs and eyes – it is stunningly beautiful in every single direction.

There are 26 designated avalanche zones on the climb and frequent rock falls occur. A plaque commemorating the huge engineering efforts is placed half way up at what I would like to call the new “hugging post”.

The weather was fantastic and Loz was climbing well doing 6:00 pace and making it hard work to keep up with her. Here is a picture from the early “flatter” sections around 8,000 feet.

Getting steeper, all the gears were getting used and both of us were feeling the altitude and having an absolute blast.

I scaled a peak with some bighorn mountain goats, snow scree and chipmunks just to get this one. Going up was the easy part, catching back up to Loz nearly had me considering hitching up the pass with one of the Texan Winnebago society members who seemed to be flocking to Yosemite for some public holiday on Monday called “Independence Day”, apparently they made a movie about it a few years ago.