The Leakey Death Ride is one of the more challenging organized rides in Texas – covering almost 200 miles (193.5 to be exact) through some of the most rugged parts of the Texas Hill Country, with almost 10,000 ft of climbing. It is a three-day event sponsored by the Fort Worth Bicycling Association, held on the third weekend of October. (This year: October 17 – 19). For us, the Death Ride is more than riding bikes for several hundred miles; it’s a weekend filled with such things as, searching for the AFD Kit, going full-tard into “Peter’s Hole,” “Pump-Pump Pump It Up,” raw egg pasta, Black Box wine, frog-eyed delight, rock throwing and a unique kind of football. More on those specifics later.

Seven good friends from our riding group (six less-than-handsome men and one beautiful lady) started the ride on Friday. From left to right is myself, Bert Miller, Bill Sanders, Jeff Porter, Toni Gonzalez Flores, Robert Parker and Peter Beverage. With this team of lawyers and experts in financial reporting, analytics development, marketing and project management we were well positioned to take on any corporate business problem the rugged hill country could throw at us.

This was my first time to do the Death Ride and I didn’t know what to expect, except lots of hill climbing through beautiful countryside. Others in the group are long time veterans. Both Bert and Peter have been doing this ride for the past 12 years. And look at what it has done to them!

Friday’s Ride – 42 miles

http://ridewithgps.com/trips/3660539

Friday started not on the bikes but at the OST diner in Bandera, Texas. Most everyone had pancakes and eggs – the pancakes as big as pizzas. Obviously, not the best thing to eat before riding. The kind diner owner gave each of us a penny with a cross stamped through it and a local bike route map.

We then drove 13 miles down the road to Medina, Texas to start the ride. This is this same place where we start our Sunday rides when in this part of the Hill Country. The weather was beautiful – dry, no wind but chilly (upper 40s to low 50s), so we put on warm clothing, knowing we would pull it off after the first big climb. The ride started on Highway 16 and was flat for the first nine miles with a gradual climb taking us 300+ ft above Medina. Then we came to the big hill of the day – a 1.5 mile climb, averaging 5.6% incline (max 12%). This is considered a CAT 4 climb and it definitely got our blood flowing (my heart rate hit 185 bpm). We shed our warm clothes and then flew down a nice 4-mile decent, hitting speeds topping 34 mph. At this point (16 miles out), we were just a few miles south of Kerrville and turned off Highway 16 onto 2771. From there to the finish we hit a series of rolling hills, taking a fairly aggressive pace that averaged 18+mph (topping 34 mph on down-hills). We finished the Friday ride covering only 42.4 miles averaging 17.5 mph and climbing 1863 ft. The ride was a good starter for the weekend’s tougher rides: not exhausting, but definitely got the blood flowing.

With the Friday ride done, the time came to relax and enjoy the rest of the day. What else do you do after almost three hours of riding? EAT! We walked across the street to the Love Creek Orchard. I’d never been there though everyone else had.

As you can see from the picture, the front entry way is very attractive. Instead of walking into a nice restaurant, I walked into a gift shop. Where was the restaurant? Turns out, it’s on the back patio of this old converted house. The patio was a semi-enclosed backyard with a mobile cook stand on one side, nice his/hers outhouses on the other side, Igloo ice chests and jugs for drinks and a handful of picnic tables in between. Different! As we sat down to eat our delicious hamburgers on homemade bread, I kept hearing about their apples. With their own apple orchard they make all kinds of homemade dishes, like Apple Pie — the tallest, deepest dish apple pie that I have ever seen, and oh so good!

After eating, Toni and Jeff headed back to San Antonio, and the rest of us headed off to Leakey for the River Haven Cabins.

The pictures give you a look of our cabin as it stands overlooking the Frio River and inside the living area.

Upon arrival, we dumped our stuff in the cabins and immediately went down to the crystal clear waters of the Frio River and got into “Peter’s Hole.” That’s right, I said “Peter’s Hole.” In the middle of the Frio River, just after the water swiftly flows over a series of rocks, Peter discovered a deep spot in rides past, dubbed “Peter’s Hole.” It’s the perfect place to soak the legs and body after a long ride, drink beer and tell stories that I can’t repeat here. It has become one of the traditions of the Death Ride.

After an hour or so in the water, Bert attempted to prepare a nice Spaghetti Carbonara dinner for us, but he forgot the olive oil. Bert’s answer, just toss more raw eggs into the pasta. Have you ever had raw egg pasta? Based on Bert’s instructions, I cracked raw eggs and stirred them into the pasta. Bert swears that the eggs actually cook in the hot pasta. One problem: the pasta was not hot. Therefore we truly had raw egg pasta. Indeed it did taste good, as long as you washed it down with Peter’s Black Box wine. All we needed was candles and we would have had a truly romantic evening. NOT!

So what do you do after eating raw egg pasta on a Friday night in Leakey, Texas – a high school football game of course! You just can’t miss the 2-5 Leakey Eagles (ranked 1121 out of 1192 schools in Texas as of 10-20-14) playing their 2-5 La Prayer Bulldog rivals. What a match up! Both schools had barely enough players to field a team. The 15-member band and two cheerleaders kept us in our concrete seats almost the whole game. The game had lots of scoring, but neither team attempted to kick a point after. Leakey’s edge was the on-side kickoff and they recovered all but one, but La Pryor almost won the game with a real running attack. In the end Leakey defeated their opponent in overtime, 44 – 42; true football excitement.

It was small town Texas football, and we loved it. The people were super friendly and we learned a new cheer “Pump-Pump Pump it up, keep that Eagle fighting spirit up.” By the way, we yelled that cheer all weekend as we rode through the Texas Hill country.

Saturday’s Ride – 102 miles

http://ridewithgps.com/tSaturday’s Ride – 102 milerips/3660544

Expecting another chilly morning, we awoke to a mild 60 degrees with clouds and a bit of humidity for our long ride for the weekend (102 miles). Joining up with the official ride event, we began our quest to find the elusive, but valuable AFD Kit; more on that later. We got started a few minutes late, so we were well behind the larger group of 50 plus riders (they started riding in Leakey and we started from the lodge located at least three miles outside Leakey).

We headed north on Hwy 336 through the Leakey valley (Frio Canyon) surrounded by beautiful hills that looked like mountains as we rode on flat terrain with a gradual incline (smooth roads) for the next 12 miles. Robert Parker led the pace line averaging 16.7 mph (max 31 mph). Then came the first good CAT 4 climb, 1.1 miles with an average grade of 6.7% (max 8.3%). This was followed by three smaller one mile climbs that brought us out of the valley and onto the plateau.

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It was on the plateau we came to the first rest stop of the Death Ride and where we learned that the official ride started much earlier than we thought, explaining why we did not see any other bike riders on the road. We continued heading north on 336, relatively flat terrain with Bert and Robert trading the pace line lead, averaging 20 mph for the next six miles.

We turned west on Hwy 41 and I picked up the pace line lead for the next 14 miles, again averaging 20 mph (max 27 mph). We had loads of fun flying through the air on open flat roads!

Turning off Hwy 41 onto Hwy 335 heading south, we pulled into another rest stop. This is where we finally saw a large group of riders in the official Death Ride event. Most of them left before we finished filling our water bottles but we took off and began picking them off one by one. We passed two older ladies dressed in nice color-coordinated jerseys that we ended up passing several times through the remainder of the weekend. This occurred as we frequently stopped for whatever reason; they consistently rode at a steady pace. The truth is I am more likely older than the ladies but I like to think of myself as still young.

We hit speeds of over 40 mph when we came to a nice mile long, steep downhill. Lots of fun! From there we continued through a constant series of rollers (small up and down hills) for the next 17 miles.

At the 58-mile mark we came around a bluff overlooking a beautiful valley with the Nueces River running through it. Bert yelled out, “This is it – our traditional rock throwing.” We got off our bikes, went to the bluff edge, picked up specially selected rocks and heaved them as far as we could. My rock proudly made it all the way to the river and splashed. Bert’s hit the rocks (on the mountain across the valley!) and Robert’s went into orbit (hasn’t landed yet): at least we didn’t hear it land. Whatever – another Death Ride tradition accomplished.

We got back on our bikes and once again passed all those riders that had passed by during our rock throwing tradition. For the next 8.5 miles we continued through constant rollers and then we finally arrived at Vance Cemetery for lunch; a perfect Death Ride setting in which we ate lunch with a fairly large group of riders that got there ahead of us. This is where the Death Ride served their famous Frog Eyed Salad. We settled down and ate sandwiches, sodas and yes, Frog Eyed Salad. It was good. Truth is, I normally eat very little on rides (slows you down), but on this ride we weren’t going for speed.

We got back on our bikes with full stomachs and within a few miles came upon an exotic wild animal reserve with its high fences (one of many we saw in the hill country), but for the first time, we actually saw wild animals. In the distance, we saw several giraffes and a herd of Axis deer (from India and Sri Lanka). Very cool.  Later on, we came upon a heard of buffalo.

After brief animal gazing, we continued south averaging around 18 mph. Then all of a sudden, the barbed wire fence along the roadside changed to a beautiful, but rather unusual tall white wall with glass spikes on top – certainly out of place in the rugged countryside. It seemed to go on forever, and a grand entrance appeared in the middle of the long wall.

Was this the true Beverly Hillbillies living in Texas, or was it a Cartel encampment? From a Google Earth view, one can see it is not just a road front façade, but a wall going completely around the expansive property. A huge home that could compete with the largest homes of any big city is found in the middle of all this fence. — true country living with all the comforts and security of the White House.

Leaving the Great Wall of Texas, we continued on to the town of Camp Wood,where we hoped to find the infamous AFD kits. All throughout the ride conversations about the AFD kit constantly arose. We discussed the importance and value of the AFD kit, who needs a kit? We even discussed the possibility that one could immediate need an AFD kit when straining up a steep climb. We finally arrived at the one place in the world where AFD Kits could be found, the Camp Wood Pico Get-N-Go.

We walked in and Robert boldly asked the attendant for an AFD Kit. She said they were out, and further said that she herself bought one of the last available. What a disappointment – no AFD kits and we were about to encounter the toughest clim b of the day. So you ask, what is AFD? It is an Accidental Fecal Discharge. When you are in the middle of nowhere (and that is where we were) and you have an Accidental Fecal Discharge and you are not wearing Depends (bike shorts are not good substitutes for Depends) then an AFD kit is valuable. On a past ride Robert Parker bought two kits and he swears by them.

Disappointed, we headed east on Hwy 337 against a stiff wind. I led the pace line as we rode 10 miles into constant climbing (in the beginning a gradual climb and then ending with an average last mile of 7% incline, (9.1% max). Camp Wood became the toughest climb of the day with 952 ft increase from town to the plateau. Following came six miles of rollers along the top of the plateau and then a fun three-mile decent (max speed of 33.3 mph). From there, we covered six more miles of easy riding back to Leakey and to our lodge.

For Saturday’s ride we all shared with leading the pace line when we found good flat roads, and Robert was typically the strongest on the climbs. The ride covered a total of 102.1 miles, at an average moving speed of 17 mph, taking us an unimpressive eight hours to cover the distance and climb a total of 4800 ft for the day. Again, we weren’t riding for time; we made lots of stops, but when riding, we took it fairly aggressive and did a good job of exhausting ourselves on the climbs. Although we were tired, we had plenty of ride in our legs for the coming day.

At the lodge Bill and I went immediately to “Peter’s Hole” to cool the legs down in the Frio River. Bert stayed in his lodge only to discover that A&M was losing 52-0. Bert and Peter joined us at the Hole to relax for an hour or so. Felt great, then hunger quickly settled in. We went to Venny’s Pizza and asked the server about their largest pizza – the 20” Grande Pizza. She said it is so large a single Grande could easily feed her entire family of 5. We immediately ordered two Grande’s and easily ate them both.

So what do you do on a Saturday night without high school football? Bert had the answer with his own unique game of football. I don’t think he would have suggested it, unless he felt he could easily win; he certainly demonstrated his capabilities when we were riding our bikes. That unique game is called “Fart Football.” Bert did win but barely; Peter almost tied it up. In the end Bert pulled it out, although he did need an AFD Kit. Fortunately, no pictures to share!

Sunday’s Ride

http://ridewithgps.com/trips/3660545

We awoke to another mild morning with temperatures in the mid 60s, no wind and partly cloudy skies. We got an early start at sunrise, 7:36 a.m. Although we had a long ride the day before, we all felt good.

Good thing, because within nine miles of riding east on Hwy 337, we would hit two back-to-back tough climbs. Before coming to those big climbs around the five mile mark, we hit a good warm-up half-mile climb averaging 6.2% incline (9.4% max). Completing the short decent, we began hitting a little wind from the east on the flat terrain. We took a tactical approach by forming a pace line which I led for the next several miles till we hit the big climbs.

Remember those two color-coordinated ladies we passed several times the day before? We passed them again as we approached the first big climb. At the start of the first big climb, Robert pulled ahead as he has done on most all the big climbs. It was a 1.5 mile CAT 3 climb averaging 6.2% incline (8.6% max). This was immediately followed by another 1.9 mile CAT 3 climb averaging 6.1% incline (9.6% max). Tired, but still alive, we began a super fun downhill decent hitting speeds up to 37 mph. We would have gone a little faster but caution prevailed as the wet road had us hitting the brakes a lot. We stopped at the Vanderpool corner store (18-mile mark) to fill up the water bottles. The two ladies we passed earlier came in a few minutes later and quickly took off to continue the ride. We too, headed out going south on Hwy 187. The road remained flat for 12 miles to the city of Utopia. With a fairly strong head wind to battle, we formed another pace line with each of us pulling for a few minutes and handing off to the next rider in line. In spite of the wind, we hit a good speed, averaging 19 mph (max 27 mph). That helped us quickly catch the “steady as you go” ladies. They tried to join our pace line but when Robert led us swiftly over a small hill, they could not keep up.

We arrived in Utopia and stopped at the PICO Shamrock station. A number of the Death Riders had gotten there before us, and the ladies soon arrived behind us, as well. As we left Utopia, Bert said we only had a few more rolling hills left on the ride, saying the big climbs were behind us back in Vanderpool. He misled me! From the time we left Utopia, we started a gradual climb and it lasted for five miles, with the last mile being a CAT 4 climb averaging 5.2% incline (9.6% max). That’s not a roller. Bert admitted he had forgotten this climb. This was not a huge climb, but after several days of riding with lots of climbs, any hill became an unwelcomed event. From there, we encountered a nice gradual downhill averaging 25 mph (35 mph max). Loads of fun!

In most long rides someone always has mechanical problems, typically a flat tire. It wasn’t till the last five miles of the last day, Bert decided to have a flat. When he pulled out his spare  tube, he realized his stem was too short. We all gathered around to makes jokes about Bert’s short stem. So Robert gave him his spare tube with the longer stem and we quickly got back on the road. Bert was not the only one with mechanical problems. Peter was plagued throughout the weekend with problems on his rear hub causing him to have to constantly peddle (even on down hills) to prevent the hub from making a noise and worsening the problem. Even Robert had his gears stick on a couple of occasions. My gears were sticking a bit too. Fortunately, none of us had problems sever enough to prevent us from finishing.

We still had two more small hills to overcome (both a little under a mile long with a max incline of 8.5%) before the easy 6.5-mile ride back to the lodge. I noticed on that last little hill my legs started to wear out. I don’t think I would have done well if we had come upon another big climb. Fortunately we had an easy ride back to the lodge averaging 17 mph (hitting 30 mph max).

The Death Ride was finally over. We covered a total of 193.5 miles; climbed 9221 ft, burned over 6600 calories and rode for over 11 hours, averaging just under 17 mph over three days – a good tough weekend of riding.

How Tough is this Ride?

Remember I said in the beginning of this write-up that this is one of the tougher rides in Texas. It is because the Leakey area has some of the most steep and long hill climbs in Texas, plus the ride is almost 200 miles long. Another ride called Cyclefest in the west Texas Davis Mountains is almost as tough consisting of 75 miles on day one, with three long climbs totaling 4250 ft, and a Sunday race to the top of Mount Locke, 1688 ft (totaling 5930 ft and 100 miles depending on where you start for the Day two race). Neither of these events compare to the Tour das Hugel ride in Austin. It is one day of riding 117 miles with 10,000 to 13,000 ft of climbing (depending who you talk to). It has sixteen CAT rated climbs with some having inclines greater than 16%. That’s tough! Some say this is one of the toughest rides in the country!

Unlike the many hills of Texas that can be very steep, the mountains across the western states offer a very long climbs but typically not as steep and numerous. The New Mexico Rough Rider 200 is difficult, covering 200 miles over two days, with over 12,300 ft of climbing. And the Colorado Triple Bypass is legendary for being one of the more difficult rides in the country. Several of us are talking about doing it next year. Finally, the California Death Ride covers 130 miles in one day through the Sierra Mountains with 15,000 ft of climbing over five mountain passes. That’s just crazy!

While the 2014 Leakey Death Ride may not be THE MOST difficult ride, it certainly is one of the most enjoyable. You cannot beat riding the roads for three days with great friends and beautiful scenery. As Bert promised, it did rejuvenate the spirit.

To get a real sense and feeling of the weekend, here is a video that Peter put together. It’s fantastic. You need the password, “pumpitup”. Password is a secret, so don’t tell anyone!

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A big thanks goes to Peter for capturing all those videos and pictures. I am amazed how he could ride his bike with one hand and take videos with his iphone in the other hand (even on tough climbs and fast down hills). And thanks to Bert for organizing the whole weekend, even though he forced me to eat raw egg pasta. Thanks to Bill for bringing the beer, although he drank all of it himself. Thanks for Robert for pulling us up all those hills, otherwise we would still be riding. And I am thankful for just being able to share the road with these guys. As I have said before, it is hard to describe the feeling when you’re cycling with good friends flying down a long quiet country road. We did just that!