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Congratulations to our 3 Creek Ranch cycling team for placing sixth in the 206-mile Lotoja road race!

On September 6th, a team of four 3 Creek Ranch road cyclists, including Geanie Young, Glenn Sturm, John Gussenhoven and (yours truly) Resident Naturalist Roger Smith raced in the 1-day, 206-mile event from Logan, Utah to Teton Village. Called Lotoja, this is the longest 1-day sanctioned road cycling race in the country, with over 1,000 riders ranging from professional to fun-class recreational riders (that would be our team). Participants can compete individually or in teams of two to five riders. Our race started Saturday morning in Logan, Utah, with Glenn Sturm attacking the first relay leg. With three of us warm and comfortable in our shuttle vehicle, we left Glenn bundled up in the chilly 6:00 AM morning air at the start of the race in downtown Logan. With two headlights on his bike and specific directions from me to take it easy till the light improved, Glenn ignored all that and averaged an impressive 21 miles per hour over 32 miles to reach Preston, Idaho ahead of schedule. Glenn handed the timing chip to me and I rode 47 miles over Strawberry Pass to Montpelier. I handed the chip over to Geanie Young, who rode an unbelievable pace over 48 miles, including not one, but two, mountain passes to finish in Afton, Wyoming. Now way ahead of our race plan expectations, Glenn and I split the riding duties between Afton and Alpine, Wyoming, a 33-mile stretch of open road and beautiful scenery. I turned into Alpine to find John Gussenhoven, who was rested and waiting to take the final leg, a 48-mile trek up the Snake River Canyon to Jackson, past 3 Creek Ranch on South Park Loop road, and into the finish line at Teton Village. John rode an unbelievable pace of 21 miles per hour over an almost entirely uphill section and came down the final stretch in an all out sprint with several other riders to the finish line. Our total time for the race was 10 hours 45 minutes, placing us sixth out of 96 recreation-class relay teams and 1 hour 18 minutes behind the first place relay team. To be perfectly honest, we set a team expectation to finish this race by 6:30 PM. We exceeded this by almost 2 hours. As a side note, the individual winner had a time of 9 hours 14 minutes, an average of nearly 22 miles per hour over 206 non-stop miles of riding!

It's difficult to express the energy and excitement one gets from participating in an event of this caliber. Part of it is being surrounded all day by people who are also excited about cycling, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and a strong willingness to simply participate. Part of it is the sense of accomplishment afterwards and for surpassing one's expectations. Perhaps more importantly, we finished with a child-like excitement to come back and race again next year, to make personal commitments to stay in shape…and simply participate. And I almost forgot, we laughed and smiled a lot.

As always, I look forward to seeing each and every one of you at the Nature Center. We have a year-round calendar of events, including our Fall hiking program and upcoming Nordic and Alpine skiing programs. As well, I encourage you to stop by the Nature Center to learn more about the wonderful world of cycling and our own cycling program here.

Respectfully,

Roger Smith
Resident Naturalist (and wannabe pro cyclist)